A Faster Way To Extract Photos From Your Digital ImagesExiftool is an open-source software program that allows you to access, compose, and edit digital images, sound and video. It's platform-independent, and is available both as a Perl command line tool and as a Perl modules. It was recently acquired by me and I tested it to see how it could be of any use to me.The program is perfect for photographers, graphic designers and programmers. It allows you to work with and extract metadata (information about the item or pictures) from your digital images. What is exif information? Software such as Camtasia Paint Shop Pro or Microsoft Office FrontPage can use metadata to categorize and save your digital photos.There are a number of ways to work with exiftool. It is very simple to use exiftool as a Perl script. You just need to specify the information you want to retrieve, which in this case is meta information. For example, I'll use "artistname". The Perl script will then search for keywords that start with the artist name and search through the database to find relevant information.I used exiftool to extract lots of useful data, such as the date the picture was taken, the size in pixels, shutter speed, flash used, lens type, and many others. Exiftool gave me interesting keywords to use in my meta tags, such "food", "concert," etc. I was particularly interested in the option that allows me to search for photos of live plants. That way, I could locate any photos of my favorite plants that had been taken during my travels.One of the greatest things about using exiftool for this project was the ability to create and track tags in both folders and the tag directory. I could search for photos within the database or tag directory and also create tags. It was a two-fold benefit. First, the tags function let you know which images you are interested in, making it easier for me to find what my searching for. Second, the tags made it easy for me to organize my photos by types of plant, for example, or by the date they were taken.The final result? Well, it was impressive to me: not only did I manage to download and upload several gigabytes of images, I also was able to organize them neatly according to categories, allowing me to find what I needed when I refreshed my xMP list. I would highly recommend exiftool to anyone with even a few gigabytes of photos to process; the benefits are nearly endless.