Get EXIF Data and GPS Location of Images in Google Drive

July 04, 2017

When you upload your images to Google Photos, they also become available in Google Drive and you can these access these image files with Google Apps Scripts and the Google Drive API.

Here’s a little snippet that will show you how to get the GPS location data, capture date and EXIF information of any photograph in your Google Drive. You’ll need to enable the Google Drive service to access the file’s meta data. The same technique can used to get the size and duration of a video file that’s in your Drive.

function getFileMetaData(fileID) {
  var api = 'https://www.googleapis.com/drive/v2/files/' + fileID;

  var params = {
    method: 'get',
    contentType: 'application/json',
    headers: { Authorization: 'Bearer ' + ScriptApp.getOAuthToken() },
    muteHttpExceptions: true,
  };

  var meta = JSON.parse(UrlFetchApp.fetch(api, params).getContentText());

  Logger.log(meta.title); // File name
  Logger.log(meta.imageMediaMetadata); // Photo EXIF data like Camera, Date taken, Focal Length, Lens, etc.
  Logger.log(meta.imageMediaMetadata.location); // Photo Location coordinates
  Logger.log(meta.videoMediaMetadata); // Video Size and Length.
}

Google Apps Script Google Drive

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Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory