Export metadata to a CSV file of the files contained in a .TXT file

[GuzmanR]

Hi,

The .TXT file has a line with the absolute PATH of each of the files, for example:
   /snap/cups/1067/share/cups/data/form_english.pdf
   /snap/cups/current/share/cups/data/default-testpage.pdf
   /snap/cups/current/share/cups/data/confidential.pdf
   ...
The .TXT file can contain several million lines.

The process consists of generating a CSV file with the metadata of each of the files indicated in the .TXT file.

How can I do this?

[Phil Harvey]

You can't use ExifTool to generate a CSV file this large with the -csv option.  CSV is very inefficient for this because a large number of columns will be mostly empty.  I suggest using JSON format instead

exiftool -@ files.txt -j > out.json

- Phil

[StarGeek]

From the docs on the -csv option

Note that this option is fundamentally different than all other output format options because it requires information from all input files to be buffered in memory before the output is written. This may result in excessive memory usage when processing a very large number of files with a single command.