Searching Image Metadata With igrep

The igrep program search one or more image files for metadata that match a string or regular expression.

Using igrep

The igrep utility is invoked as follows:

igrep [options] pattern filename …

Where pattern is a POSIX.2 regular expression (just like the Unix/Linux grep(1) command), and filename (and any following names) specify images or directories that should be searched. An image file will “match” if any of its metadata contains values contain substring that are recognized regular expression. The image files may be of any format recognized by OpenImageIO (i.e., for which ImageInput plugins are available).

Example:

$ igrep Jack *.jpg
bar.jpg: Keywords = Carly; Jack
foo.jpg: Keywords = Jack
test7.jpg: ImageDescription = Jack on vacation

igrep command-line options

--help

Prints usage information to the terminal.

--version

Prints the version designation of the OIIO library.

-d

Print directory names as it recurses. This only happens if the -r option is also used.

-E

Interpret the pattern as an extended regular expression (just like egrep or grep -E).

-f

Match the expression against the filename, as well as the metadata within the file.

-i

Ignore upper/lower case distinctions. Without this flag, the expression matching will be case-sensitive.

-l

Simply list the matching files by name, suppressing the normal output that would include the metadata name and values that matched. For example:

$ igrep Jack *.jpg
bar.jpg: Keywords = Carly; Jack
foo.jpg: Keywords = Jack
test7.jpg: ImageDescription = Jack on vacation

$ igrep -l Jack *.jpg
bar.jpg
foo.jpg
test7.jpg

-r

Recurse into directories. If this flag is present, any files specified that are directories will have any image file contained therein to be searched for a match (an so on, recursively).

-v

Invert the sense of matching, to select image files that do not match the expression.