How to Extract Metadata from an Image

Information security is an interesting field and profession which is not limited to find vulnerability on the network and website but it involve different techniques to secure an information, the word “Information Security” give its meaning by itself. To find information we need to find the source of information, it is always good to find the maximum information because information helps us to get success. Information might be get from human (Social Engineering), database (Database Hacking) and even some relevant information can be fetch out from an image and video.

What Is MetaData?

Metadata is the hidden data that define other data, metadata can extract from an image, video, document and any other file. Metadata describes and gives relevant information about the data which is currently examine, there are so many tools are avaiable to extract metadata from files, and even you can use some famous tools for example: Maltego, FOCA and so on.

How to Extract MetaData from Files?

Exiftool is one of the best tool to extract metadata from an image, it give relevant information of photo: e.g Software information, creator information, GPS coordinates, and many more.

First step is to get Exiftool, it is available for cross operating system including Windows, Linux and MAC.

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

For Linux kindly follow the tutorial:

root@bt:~# tar zxvf Image-ExifTool-9.14.tar.gz

root@bt:~# Perl Makefile.PL

root@bt:~# Make test

root@bt:~# Sudo make install

The tool is configure and ready to use, for Windows OS just download Exiftools and unzip it.

The usage is very simple, type Exiftool on terminal to get help and use the following command to extract metadata from an image.

root@bt:~# exiftool -a -u -g1 Image.png

A detail writeup on the similar topic is available on Infosec Institute portal.  

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