How to get information about an image (picture) from the Linux command-line?

Question

Am working on a web-app, and currently am migrating some stuff from an old app, but I hate that I have to open an image editor to get some info about images I am migrating. Things like image dimensions.

Is there a command-line tool I can use for such tasks in Linux?

Answer 1

For some image formats you can just use the file command:

$ file MyPNG.png 
MyPNG.png: PNG image, 681 x 345, 8-bit/color RGB, non-interlaced

Not all image formats report the size (JPEG most notably doesn't):

$ file MyJpeg.jpg 
MyJpeg.jpg: JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01

For those you will have to use something more elaborate, like:

$ convert MyJpeg.jpg -print "Size: %wx%h\n" /dev/null
Size: 380x380

The convert command is part of the ImageMagick package.

Answer 2

The best way to get this information is by using the identify command:

$ identify image.png

or only size atributes

$ identify -format "%wx%h" photo.jpg

It is part of ImageMagick, which you can install on Ubuntu like so:

$ sudo apt-get install imagemagick

Answer 3

exiv2 is "the tool" to get information from picture files:

~$exiv2 myimage.jpg

outputs:

File name       : myimage.jpg
File size       : 1196944 Bytes
MIME type       : image/jpeg
Image size      : 2592 x 1944
Camera make     : LG Electronics
Camera model    : LG-P970
Image timestamp : 2013:05:19 17:27:06
Image number    : 
Exposure time   : 1/9 s
Aperture        : 
Exposure bias   : 0 EV
Flash           : Yes, compulsory
Flash bias      : 
Focal length    : 3.7 mm
Subject distance: 
ISO speed       : 745
Exposure mode   : 
Metering mode   : Average
Macro mode      : 
Image quality   : 
Exif Resolution : 
White balance   : Auto
Thumbnail       : image/jpeg, 13776 Bytes
Copyright       : 
Exif comment    :

Answer 4

mediainfo would give even more detailed info. It is usually in the standard repos on Linux, and also available via homebrew on OSX.

Try for example running in the current folder:

mediainfo *

or

mediainfo .

Both commands will show info on all media files in the current folder and subfolders.

Show info on all JPG images starting from current folder (includes subfolders):

find . -iname "*.jpg" -exec mediainfo {} \;

It is also very useful with audio and video files, in that it shows the bitrate of all audio/video streams, encoding algorythm, container type, FOURCC code, i.e. XVID, X264, etc.

There is also a GUI available in standard repos for all major distros usually named mediainfo-gui

Answer 5

Also, check out ExifTool by Phil Harvey; an example:

$ exiftool test.png 
ExifTool Version Number         : 8.15
File Name                       : test.png
Directory                       : .
File Size                       : 12 MB
File Modification Date/Time     : 2014:02:13 13:04:52+01:00
File Permissions                : rw-r--r--
File Type                       : PNG
MIME Type                       : image/png
Image Width                     : 2490
Image Height                    : 3424
Bit Depth                       : 8
Color Type                      : RGB
Compression                     : Deflate/Inflate
Filter                          : Adaptive
Interlace                       : Noninterlaced
Significant Bits                : 8 8 8
Image Size                      : 2490x3424

Btw, I was looking to get information on dpi/resolution from the command line; and interestingly, sometimes none of these tools report that in an image (like in the above snippet); for more on that, see I want to change DPI with Imagemagick without changing the actual byte-size of the image data - Super User - however, identify -verbose seems to work for the same image as in the previous snippet:

$ identify -verbose test.png 
Image: test.png
  Format: PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
  Class: DirectClass
  Geometry: 2490x3424+0+0
  Resolution: 72x72
  Print size: 34.5833x47.5556
  Units: Undefined
  Type: TrueColor
  Endianess: Undefined
  Colorspace: RGB
  Depth: 8-bit
  Channel depth:
    red: 8-bit
    green: 8-bit
    blue: 8-bit
  Channel statistics:
    Red:
      min: 8 (0.0313725)
      max: 255 (1)
      mean: 237.541 (0.931533)
      standard deviation: 37.2797 (0.146195)
      kurtosis: 21.2876
      skewness: -4.56853
    Green:
      min: 15 (0.0588235)
      max: 255 (1)
      mean: 240.007 (0.941204)
      standard deviation: 37.8264 (0.148339)
      kurtosis: 20.7241
      skewness: -4.51584
    Blue:
      min: 9 (0.0352941)
      max: 255 (1)
      mean: 240.349 (0.942547)
      standard deviation: 38.7118 (0.151811)
      kurtosis: 22.255
      skewness: -4.72275
  Image statistics:
    Overall:
      min: 8 (0.0313725)
      max: 255 (1)
      mean: 179.474 (0.703821)
      standard deviation: 108.711 (0.426316)
      kurtosis: -0.958865
      skewness: -0.995795
  Rendering intent: Undefined
  Interlace: None
  Background color: white
  Border color: rgb(223,223,223)
  Matte color: grey74
  Transparent color: black
  Compose: Over
  Page geometry: 2490x3424+0+0
  Dispose: Undefined
  Iterations: 0
  Compression: Zip
  Orientation: Undefined
  Properties:
    date:create: 2014-02-13T13:11:08+01:00
    date:modify: 2014-02-13T13:04:52+01:00
    signature: bada990d3ba29b311501146d9013d67cf36f667c6d39b1f28a72ce913924397d
  Artifacts:
    verbose: true
  Tainted: False
  Filesize: 12.52MB
  Number pixels: 8.526M
  Pixels per second: 7.894M
  User time: 1.080u
  Elapsed time: 0:02.080
  Version: ImageMagick 6.6.2-6 2012-08-17 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org

... although, it can be a bit tricky to read resolution in units of PixelsPerInch using identify -verbose - see ImageMagick • View topic - Cannot set units to pixelsperinch?.

Answer 6

identify -verbose image.png

identify is from the ImageMagick package.

It also extract exif informations from jpeg image.

Answer 7

You can try this command if above answers don't work:

rdjpgcom -verbose photo.jpg

It will show info like:

JPEG image is 564w * 779h, 3 color components, 8 bits per sample

Answer 8

I just discovered that less (with lessfile/lesspipe) can actually display image info by using ImageMagick behind the scene:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick
less wallpaper.jpg

Output

wallpaper.jpg JPEG 1920x1200 1920x1200+0+0 8-bit DirectClass 580KB 0.000u 0:00.000

Answer 9

Other method not posted above, is using feh (you need to install it):

feh -l image.jpg

Output:

NUM FORMAT  WIDTH   HEIGHT  PIXELS  SIZE(bytes) ALPHA   FILENAME
1   jpeg    1280    960     1228800 91319       -       image.jpg

Using:

feh -l *.jpg

Will output a table (as above) but with all images information (incrementing the NUM column). Useful to use in scripts.

Answer 10

The tool you want is file.

It shows a surprising amount of info about all sorts of files.

The syntax is:

$ file my_pic.jpg

Answer 11

You can use :

php -r "print_r(getimagesize('file:///archives/Picture/12 farvardin/20120331_013.jpg'));"

Also you can replace file:// with http://

Answer 12

If you're dealing with PNGs, there might be attributes that I've found difficult to read with almost any software. For those, you should use pngmeta:

pngmeta file.png

That's particularly useful for thumbnails, since, according to FreeDesktop standard, should be PNG formatted and store path information as a PNG attribute (Thumb::URI).