Get date and time when photo was taken from EXIF data using PIL

Question

I can get the EXIF data from an image using PIL, but how can I get the date and time that the photo was taken?

Answer 1

ExifTags.TAGS is a mapping from tag to tag name. You can use it to create a map of tag names to values.

On this particular picture, there are a few different "date" properties (DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, DateTimeDigitized) that could be used.

import json
from PIL import Image, ExifTags
from datetime import datetime

def main(filename):
    image_exif = Image.open(filename)._getexif()
    if image_exif:
        # Make a map with tag names
        exif = { ExifTags.TAGS[k]: v for k, v in image_exif.items() if k in ExifTags.TAGS and type(v) is not bytes }
        print(json.dumps(exif, indent=4))
        # Grab the date
        date_obj = datetime.strptime(exif['DateTimeOriginal'], '%Y:%m:%d %H:%M:%S')
        print(date_obj)
    else:
        print('Unable to get date from exif for %s' % filename)

Output:

{
    "DateTimeOriginal": "2008:11:15 19:36:24",
    "DateTimeDigitized": "2008:11:15 19:36:24",
    "ColorSpace": 1,
    "ExifImageWidth": 3088,
    "SceneCaptureType": 0,
    "ExifImageHeight": 2320,
    "SubjectDistanceRange": 2,
    "ImageDescription": "               ",
    "Make": "Hewlett-Packard                ",
    "Model": "HP Photosmart R740             ",
    "Orientation": 1,
    "DateTime": "2008:11:15 19:36:24",
    ...
}
2008-11-15 19:36:24