EXIF is the most common format of photo metadata in photography. Nearly all camera brands use this format to provide information about the photos you have taken. Information contained in EXIF commonly are ISO range, aperture, shutter speed, date taken, focal length and so on. The question is, how to view EXIF data of a photo?

Viewing EXIF data of a certain photo is really easy. Common file managers like Windows Explorer, Apple’s file explorer to Nautilus have the ability to view EXIF data of a photo. However, not all of those file managers display a complete information.

If you are a photography hobbyist who use Linux on your daily basis, you will find a fact that Nautilus, one of the most popular file manager in Linux, doesn’t display the aperture value every time you want to view the EXIF data of a certain photo from the Properties options.

Is there any solution if you want to check the aperture value of a photo in Linux? Always.

Linux is a community-based platform. Many people want to contribute in providing useful tools that be used by other users. ImageMagick is one of useful tools that you can use to handle some image-related tasks. Including viewing the EXIF data.

ImageMagick itself is an utility package consisting of several tools. To view the EXIF data of a photo you can utilize an ImageMagick’s tool called identify. To start viewing the EXIF data you can run identify by adding the parameter of verbose. Take a look at the example below.

identify -verbose DSC_1736.JPG

By executing the command above you will see the metadata of a photo you want to check. However, the displayed information might is too much. You can filter the result using grep.

identify -verbose DSC_1736.JPG | grep "exif:"

The command above will show the following result.

If you want to know more about identify you can read the manual page by typing man identify on the terminal. Or, just type identify on the terminal without adding any option to see the parameters of the tool.