The Python Papers

How to Get TIFF Tag Data with Python

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 20:33:53 GMT

Last week, you learned how to get EXIF metadata from your JPEG files. This week, you will learn how to get similar data from the TIFF image format.

Pillow provides a similar dictionary for TIFF images in its TiffTags module. If you need a TIFF image, you can use this one, which is a cover from one of the author's other books on ReportLab:

You can create your own TIFF metadata extractor utility by making a new file named tiff_metadata.py and adding this code to it:

Here, you import the TAGS dictionary from the PIL.TiffTags submodule. Then, in get_metadata(), you access the tag elements in the image by iterating over the contents of tag.items(). To make that information more readable, you use the TAGS dictionary that you imported.

Here is a sample of the output you will get when you run this code:

You can see that the value entries above are all tuples. This is because of how the data is returned from the tag data. If you would like a challenge, you can try cleaning up this data a bit in your version of the metadata extraction utility.

Wrapping Up

EXIF and TIFF metadata are really useful for encoding lots of information in your images. However, most people don’t even know that data is there! Knowing how to access your photo’s metadata allows you to do all kinds of programmatic tasks, such as resizing, sorting files by various parameters, and much more.

You can use Pillow and Python to do all kinds of other image processing, so this is just scratching the surface. Download Pillow today and start learning!

Want to Learn More?

You can learn more about what you can do with Python and Pillow in Mike’s book, Pillow: Image Processing with Python

Purchase at Gumroad, Leanpub, or Amazon

How to Get Image EXIF Data with Python

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:40:55 GMT

Digital photographs of the JPG filetype include a type of metadata that is known as Exchangeable Image File Format or simply Exif. You can access these tags using the PIL.ExifTags module.

You can learn more about this module by checking out its documentation.

In this article, you will focus on getting this image metadata using Pillow.

Getting Exif Tag Data

The Exchangeable Image File Format contains quite a bit of data about your photographs. It includes your camera’s settings when you took the image, such as ISO, aperture, focal length, exposure value, and more. Some cameras also include geographic coordinates in their Exif tags.

You will be using one of the author’s photos of a local bridge from the state of Iowa as it contains good Exif data:

Pillow can be used to retrieve the Exif metadata from the bridge photo above. To see how this works, create a file named exif_getter.py and add this code to it:

In this example, you create get_exif(), which takes in the path to the image that you want to extract Exif tags from. Then you create an exif_table, which is a Python dictionary. Next, you open up the image using Pillow and extract the Exif information using _getexif(). After that, you loop over the items you extracted and use Pillow’s TAGS, which is a hard-coded Python dictionary that maps a hexadecimal value to a human-readable name.

Once you have decoded the Exif data and populated the exif_table dictionary, you return the data. When you run this code using the bridge image, you will get a lot of output.

The following is a sample of some of the data that is returned:

Some of the data that is returned is not human-readable. One of the shortest examples is ComponentsConfiguration mentioned above. But there are several others. The ComponentsConfiguration property is a representation of the color planes in the image, starting at the 1st plane and going through the 4th plane. Not all images have the same amount of data as others. It depends on your camera and how much data it can record.

If you have edited the image yourself, you may have inadvertently deleted the Exif data. While it’s nice to crop or enhance a photo, you need to keep that in mind if you want to preserve the Exif data. You can use it to help you take photos in the future since it has all your camera settings at the time the shot was taken.

Now let’s find out how to get the Global Positioning System (GPS) Exif information from your images!

Getting GPS Exif Data

Camera phones can tag your photos with location data when you take a photo. Most phones have this off by default, but you can turn it on if you want to. Some newer cameras have built-in Global Positioning System (GPS) that provides this capability. The digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras usually have some kind of accessory you can attach to your camera to have it record GPS too. Or you can add the GPS tags yourself on your computer!

Regardless of how the GPS information ends up in your photo, you can use Pillow to get it. For this example, you will use this image that was taken at Jester Park in Granger, Iowa:

Now that you have a photo to use, you need to write some code! Open up your editor and create a new file named gps_exif_getter.py. Then add the following:

The first new item here is that you need to import GPSTAGS in addition to TAGS. The next thing you need to do is add a second loop (lines 16-18) after decoding the regular Exif tags. Right before that second loop, you create a new gps_info dictionary. Then you loop over the keys in the exif_table['GPSInfo'] dictionary and decode the GPS tags in the same way that you did with the regular Exif tags.

When you run this code, you should get the following output:

You can use this information to look up the image's location on a map. You could even write some code for Google Maps that you could use to programmatically load up a map of where you took your photos, if you wanted to.

Wrapping Up

Image metadata is important. You can use it to learn how to take better photographs. If your camera supports geographic tagging, you can use that data to programmatically determine where a photo was taken.

You can use EXIF data to build all kinds of fun applications that you can use to analyze photos, label them, combine them, and do much more using Python or other external tools.

Want to Learn More?

You can learn more about what you can do with Python and Pillow in Mike’s book, Pillow: Image Processing with Python

Purchase at Gumroad, Leanpub, or Amazon

How to Resize a Photo with Python

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 27 May 2026 14:13:15 GMT

Sometimes you will find yourself wanting to resize a photo. I usually do this for photos I plan to email or post on a website, since some of my images can be quite large. Normal people use an image editor. I usually do as well, but for fun, I thought I would look into how to do it in Python.

The quickest way to do this is to use the Pillow package, which…

Python 101 - How to Scrape a Website

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 19 May 2026 15:48:09 GMT

The Internet is the host of much of the world’s information, both past and present. You can find history, news, comics, and much more on the Internet. As a software developer, you might want to gain access to the troves of data that exist on the Internet. Some web pages provide a free or paid Application Programming Interface (API) that you can use to p…

Convert a Photo to Black and White in Python

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 12 May 2026 17:42:18 GMT

Black-and-white images aren’t for everyone. I personally like to play around with them, as you can sometimes take a boring photo and turn it into something dramatic. I have also rescued a drab photo by turning it black and white. If you want to convert a photo you took to black and white programmatically, the Pillow package has you covered. In this arti…

Textual-cogs 0.0.5 Released

Mike Driscoll — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:21:14 GMT

I always thought it would be fun to create my own open source libraries or applications and distribute them somehow. When I started writing my book, Creating TUI Applications with Textual and Python, I took the plunge and wrote a helper package called textual-cogs, which is a collection of reusable dialogs and widgets for Textual. Right now, it is mostl…

Python Pop Quiz - Modulo List Comprehension

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:18:31 GMT

Python list comprehensions are great. The list comprehension is a way to take a Python for loop and make it a one-liner piece of code.

List comprehensions can include conditional statements that act like filters. They can even contain other list comprehensions, making them difficult to read and comprehend.

If you don’t know how to make a list comprehensio…

wxPython - Creating a Simple Image Viewer

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:50:30 GMT

The first step in creating an application is to come up with an idea. You could try to copy something simple like Microsoft Paint or Notepad. You will quickly find that they aren’t so easy to emulate as you would think, though! So instead, you will create a simple application that can load and display a photo.

When it comes to creating a GUI application,…

Python 101 - How to Create an "exe" for Mac

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:31:13 GMT

Each operating system has its own method of installing or running an application. On Windows, you run an executable most of the time. Executables have an extension of .exe. Apple’s Mac software has the concept of applications that use the extension .app. These are technically a bundle of files including a runnable binary. They are kind of like a runnabl…

Textual - An Intro to DOM Queries (Part II)

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 17:06:39 GMT

Last week, you learned the basics of Textual’s DOM queries. If you missed it, you can read the article now!

In this tutorial you will be learning about the following topics:

The DOMQuery object
Getting the first or last widget
Query filters
Query exclusions
Other query methods

Let’s get started!

The DOMQuery Object

The DOMQuery object gets returned whenever you …

Textual - An Intro to DOM Queries (Part I)

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:54:55 GMT

In this article, you will learn how to query the DOM in Textual. You will discover that the DOM keeps track of all the widgets in your application. By running queries against the DOM, you can find widgets quickly and update them, too.

You will be learning the following topics related to the DOM:

The query one method
Textual queries

You will learn more in th…

Python Pop Quiz - List Popping

Mike Driscoll — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:05:09 GMT

The Python list data type is much like an array in other programming languages. The list includes many different methods. You can get a full listing of those methods like this:

my_list = []
print(dir(my_list))

One of those methods is called pop(). You can pass an index of the item you want to pop from the list (if you don’t, the last item is chosen). That…

Python Pop Quiz - Truthy or Falsey

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:40:58 GMT

Python supports Booleans in much the same way as other programming languages do. In Python’s case, it uses the True and False keywords. But there is also the concept of truthy and falsey. An example of a truthy value in Python is a number greater than zero (also a number less than zero), and an example of a falsey value would be an empty string. When us…

Textual - Creating a Custom Checkbox

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 18:04:42 GMT

Textual is a great Python user interface package. Textual lets you create a GUI-like interface in your terminal.

You can use many different widgets in Textual. However, the widget you will be focusing on in this tutorial is the humble checkbox.

Checkboxes are used for Boolean choices. They return a True if checked and a False if unchecked. You can use a c…

Python Pop Quiz - Positional Arguments

Mike Driscoll — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 13:37:38 GMT

Python functions can take in several different types of arguments. What are the different argument types called?

If you don’t know, you should review the following:

Positional arguments
Keyword arguments

This information may help you solve the quiz, or it may confuse you more. Read the next section when you’re ready to take a crack at it!

The Quiz

How do you …

Python Pop Quiz - Type Addition

Mike Driscoll — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:43:24 GMT

Python has multiple built-in functions you can use to introspect your code. You’ll learn more about those functions in a later quiz.

For this quiz, you’ll focus on isinstance(), a function you can use to check if a variable is a particular type. For example, you might want to check if a variable is a string or an integer.

Good luck!

The Quiz

What will be th…

Python Pop Quiz - Letter Explosion

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 15:17:53 GMT

You learned about exploding a range object in the last quiz. For this quiz, you will extend that knowledge and discover what happens when you explode a string.

But wait! There’s more here than meets the eye. What is up with the numbers in the squiggly brackets?

If you’re familiar with string methods, you can figure this quiz out pretty quickly!

The Quiz

Wha…

Python Basic Type Hinting

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 17:13:09 GMT

When Python first added type hinting to the language in version 3.5, you could only add type hints to functions. However, in Python 3.6, the language added the ability to annotate variables as well. Over the following years, Python has steadily added more features to its type hinting capabilities and slowly refined the typing interface.

You will be study…

Python Pop Quiz - Number Explosion

Mike Driscoll — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:43:48 GMT

You will sometimes come across examples of code that use one or two asterisks. Depending on how the asterisks are used, they can mean different things to Python.

Check your understanding of what a single asterisk means in the following quiz!

The Quiz

What will be the output if you run this code?

A) {range}

B) (range)

C) [0, 1, 2]

D) (0, 1, 2)

E) {0, 1, 2}

St…

Python Typing Book Kickstarter

Mike Driscoll — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 15:25:28 GMT

Python has had type hinting support since Python 3.5, over TEN years ago! However, Python’s type annotations have changed repeatedly over the years. In Python Typing: Type Checking for Python Programmers, you will learn all you need to know to add type hints to your Python applications effectively.

You will also learn how to use Python type checkers, con…