Please help! Need to Optimize Command

[blue-j]

I've been asked to grab width, height and resolution from 28,000 files, across 30 folders.  I'm executing this and it's taking forever:

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exiftool -csv -filename -imagewidth -imageheight -xresolution -r /path/to/Folder > /Desktop/all.csv

Is there a way to make this faster? -stay_open didn't seem right, but I've never used it.

- J

[greybeard]

It shouldn't take forever unless something is going wrong. How long have you let it run?

Are there a lot of other files on that drive? You could try restricting to just the file types you need (-ext jpg or whatever)

Is this a particularly slow drive? Have you looked at a monitor to make sure its continuing to actually read the drive?

Have you tried running against a subset to get an idea of how long it's taking? 

I tried running this command against a relatively slow external spinning disk with a random selection of files and restricted it to 20K FujiFilm raw files and it took just 17 minutes.

[Phil Harvey]

You may run into memory slow-downs using -csv with so many files.  Try this instead:

exiftool -p "$filename,$imagewidth,$imageheight,$xresolution" -fast2 -r /path/to/Folder > /Desktop/all.csv

(but note that you will have problems if any file names contain a comma.)

I have also added -fast2 to help speed things up a bit.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

(but note that you will have problems if any file names contain a comma.)

See FAQ #12, part that starts "But note that any values containing commas"

[Phil Harvey]

(but note that you will have problems if any file names contain a comma.)

See FAQ #12, part that starts "But note that any values containing commas"

Very good!

- Phil

[blue-j]

Thank you so much!  I really appreciate it.  It did help.  I neglected to mention a major confounding variable - these files were on a cloud storage platform mirrored locally, so each one had to be downloaded before ET could read it!

-J

[blue-j]

...Try this instead:

exiftool -p "$filename,$imagewidth,$imageheight,$xresolution" -fast2 -r /path/to/Folder > /Desktop/all.csv

When I use this command, if any of the images are missing any of the metadata, it returns all as blank.  Is there a way to mitigate this outcome?

- J

[Phil Harvey]

I think the -p option documentation explains this well:

            If a specified tag does not exist, a minor warning is issued and
            the line with the missing tag is not printed.  However, the -f
            option may be used to set the value of missing tags to '-' (but
            this may be configured via the API MissingTagValue option), or the
            -m option may be used to ignore minor warnings and leave the
            missing values empty.  Alternatively, -q -q may be used to simply
            suppress the warning messages.

- Phil

[blue-j]

Thanks so much!  I had just found the -f solution but the -m one is better still!  I didn't think to check the -p documentation; I hadn't realized it was the primary switch.

- J