How does Exiv2 compare to Exiftool?¶

Phil Harvey's excellent Exiftool is a bit older than Exiv2 and was initially a pure Exif reader, while Exiv2 was designed to read and write Exif metadata from the beginning. Today Exiftool is amazingly complete, it reads and writes metadata, supports more image formats, more types of metadata and more Makernotes than Exiv2 and Andreas considers it the reference implementation for image metadata.

The key difference is that Exiv2 is written in C++ and Exiftool is written in Perl. Because of that, Exiv2 naturally has faster performance and is easier to integrate with C/C++ and Obj/C applications. Exiftool on the other hand has a more comprehensive feature set.

That said, Phil Harvey has written a C++ interface for ExifTool| [[http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/cpp_exiftool/]].

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