Document Metadata Extraction

Here are tools that will extract metadata from document files.

Office Files

antiword

http://www.winfield.demon.nl/

catdoc

http://www.45.free.net/~vitus/software/catdoc/

laola

http://user.cs.tu-berlin.de/~schwartz/pmh/index.html

word2x

http://word2x.sourceforge.net/

wvWare

http://wvware.sourceforge.net/

Extracts metadata from various Microsoft Word files (doc). Can also convert doc files to other formats such as HTML or plain text.

PDF Files

xpdf

http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/

pdfinfo (part of the xpdf package) displays some metadata of PDF files.

pdfimages

Part of xpdf, this program will strip all of the images out of a PDF file and put each in its own file.

(See PDF)

Images

jhead

http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/jhead/

Displays or modifies Exif data in JPEG files.

vinetto

http://vinetto.sourceforge.net/

Examines Thumbs.db files.

libexif

http://sourceforge.net/projects/libexif EXIF tag Parsing Library

General

These general-purpose programs frequently work when the special-purpose programs fail, but they generally provide less detailed information.

Metadata Assistant

http://www.payneconsulting.com/products/metadataent/

hachoir-metadata

Extraction tool, part of Hachoir project

file

The UNIX file program can extract some metadata

GNU libextractor

http://gnunet.org/libextractor/ The libextractor library is a plugable system for extracting metadata