ExifTool is a powerful command-line tool used for reading, writing, and editing metadata information in various file types, especially image and video files. It can extract, modify, and manipulate metadata such as camera settings, date and time, GPS location, authorship details, and much more embedded within these files. This tool is commonly used by photographers, forensic analysts, and anyone needing to manage or analyze metadata in digital files.
In this Lab, I first needed to install ExifTool onto my system. I used the the sudo make install command to start the process of compiling and installing the software from its source code, then and checked to see how much storage memory was used during the installation. I next read through the ExifTool documentation in order to understand the flags required for utilizing the tool. The command exiftool -a is used to extract all available metadata from a file. Finally I discovered sudo permissions were also necessary to complete the successful extraction from the file named “Leaked File.png”, and once aggregated to my original command, permitted me to finish the lab.