Ability to Automatically extract Exif data from photos

[cgoldberg]

I'm developing an App in which users would be uploading photos to share with friends.  We plan to host the App on AWS or another hosting company.  I am looking for the ability to run a program that would scan and extract Exif data from photos as they are being uploaded and before they are being posted on the App.  Does anyone know of a way to accomplish this?  Does the ExifTool provide this capability?  If so, would I just run this on a windows server that would see all the photos once they have been uploaded and before we post them to our App?  I'm curious to know how long it would take for a standard 1MB image?  We expect to see 1000s of photos per day or more so we need to ensure the server/software could handle this many transactions.  I'm not very technical, so I would share any responses with my development team. 

Thanks,
Clay

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Clay,

Typically this is done on Mac/Linux with a cron job.  I don't know what the equivalent is in windows, but whatever it is can launch exiftool on any images that appear in a directory.  If you are worried about performance, you can keep exiftool running (with the -stay_open option) and then you can expect less than 0.1 seconds per image processing time, but you can improve on this with the -fast option if you don't care about every little bit of metadata being extracted.

- Phil

[cgoldberg]

Phil-

Thanks for the response and for the information.  I expect to be working on this at some point in the next few weeks so this is a great starting point for me.

Clay