FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified: exiftool

Question

I am trying to extract the metadata from an mp4/jpg file. I am using exiftool, but if there is something better out there please say. I would like to begin with a video, extract the frames as jpgs and add the metadata to each frame, there should be slight differences in each of the metadata for the images like time and maybe focal length.

Here is the start of my attempt with https://smarnach.github.io/pyexiftool/. I don't think its even loading as et, but I am new at this and do not know what could be the problem?

Here is the MWE (which is pretty much what is in the documentation) - it does the same whether I use .jpg or .mp4

import exiftool

files = ['file.MP4', 'file.MP4']

with exiftool.ExifTool() as et:
    metadata = et.get_metadata_batch(files)
for d in metadata:
    print("{:20.20} {:20.20}".format(d["SourceFile"],
                                     d["EXIF:DateTimeOriginal"]))

and the error:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
FileNotFoundError                         Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-4-2bf611f4ab6b> in <module>
      9 files = ['file.MP4', 'file1.MP4']
     10 
---> 11 with exiftool.ExifTool() as et:
     12     metadata = et.get_metadata_batch(files)
     13 for d in metadata:

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\exiftool.py in __enter__(self)
    189 
    190     def __enter__(self):
--> 191         self.start()
    192         return self
    193 

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\exiftool.py in start(self)
    172                  "-common_args", "-G", "-n"],
    173                 stdin=subprocess.PIPE, stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
--> 174                 stderr=devnull)
    175         self.running = True
    176 

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\subprocess.py in __init__(self, args, bufsize, executable, stdin, stdout, stderr, preexec_fn, close_fds, shell, cwd, env, universal_newlines, startupinfo, creationflags, restore_signals, start_new_session, pass_fds, encoding, errors)
    727                                 c2pread, c2pwrite,
    728                                 errread, errwrite,
--> 729                                 restore_signals, start_new_session)
    730         except:
    731             # Cleanup if the child failed starting.

C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\subprocess.py in _execute_child(self, args, executable, preexec_fn, close_fds, pass_fds, cwd, env, startupinfo, creationflags, shell, p2cread, p2cwrite, c2pread, c2pwrite, errread, errwrite, unused_restore_signals, unused_start_new_session)
   1015                                          env,
   1016                                          os.fspath(cwd) if cwd is not None else None,
-> 1017                                          startupinfo)
   1018             finally:
   1019                 # Child is launched. Close the parent's copy of those pipe

FileNotFoundError: [WinError 2] The system cannot find the file specified

Answer 1

The way you use pyexiftool requires that exiftool is available in a directory listed in the $PATH environment variable.

Open a cmd window, type in the command exiftool and hit enter. If that also returns a "file not found" error, then either

1. exiftool is not installed or
2. the directory where exiftool is installed is not in the path.

In case (2) you can give the full path to the exiftool executable in the constructor. For example:

exiftool.ExifTool(r'C:\program files\exiftool\exiftool.exe')