Skip to content

Here are tools that will extract metadata from document files.

Tools

antiword

Belkasoft Evidence Center

Extracts metadata from various Microsoft Office files (both 97-2003 and 2007-2013 formats), as well as Open Office documents. Besides, can extract plain texts (combining all texts from all XLS/XLSX/ODS pages and PPT/PPTX/ODP slides) and embedded objects. The tool can visualize pictures embedded in a document.

catdoc

word2x

wvWare

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

FI Tools

More than 100 file types.

PDF Files

Belkasoft Evidence Center

Extracts metadata from PDF files. Besides, can extract texts and embedded objects. For pictures, embedded into a PDF document, the tool can visualize them all right in its user interface.

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

XpdfReader

Images

Belkasoft Evidence Center

Extracts EXIF metadata from JPEG files as well as many digital camera raw files. The tool allows a user to create complex filters based on various criteria on EXIF properties. Photos with GPS coordinates can be shown on Google Maps and Google Earth. Evidence Center can analyze existing Thumbs.db files and Thumbs Cache as well as carve deleted thumbnails.

Exiftool

Free, cross-platform tool to extract metadata from many different file formats. Also supports writing

jhead https://www.sentex.ca/~mwandel/jhead/

Displays or modifies Exif data in JPEG files.

vinetto https://vinetto.sourceforge.net/

Examines Thumbs.db files.

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

Adroit Photo Forensics

Displays meta data and uses date and camera meta-data for grouping, timelines etc.

exiftags

open source utility to parse and edit exif data in JPEG images. Found in many Debian based distributions.

exifprobe

Open source utility that reads exif data in JPEG and some "RAW" image formats. Found in many Debian based distributions.

Exiv2

Open source C++ library and command line tool for reading and writing metadata in various image formats. Found in almost every GNU/Linux distribution

pngmeta

Open source command line tool that extracts metadata from PNG images. Found in many Debian based distributions.

General

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

Metadact-e "Patented server-based metadata cleaning software that previews, cleans and converts documents in Microsoft Outlook, Web Access email, tablets and smartphones, as well as desktop-based documents."

Metadata Extraction Tool "Developed by the National Library of New Zealand to programmatically extract preservation metadata from a range of file formats like PDF documents, image files, sound files Microsoft office documents, and many others."

hachoir-metadata Extraction tool, part of Hachoir project

file The UNIX file program can extract some metadata

GNU libextractor The libextractor library is a plugable system for extracting metadata

Directory Lister Pro Directory Lister Pro is a Windows tool which creates listings of files from selected directories on hard disks, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs, floppies, USB storages and network shares. Listing can be in HTML, text or CSV format (for easy import to Excel). Listing can contain standard file information like file name, extension, type, owner and date created, but especially for forensic analysis file meta data can be extracted from various formats: 1) executable file information (EXE, DLL, OCX) like file version, description, company, product name. 2) multimedia properties (MP3, AVI, WAV, JPG, GIF, BMP, MKV, MKA, MPEG) like track, title, artist, album, genre, video format, bits per pixel, frames per second, audio format, bits per channel. 3) Microsoft Office files (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX) like document title, author, keywords, word count. For each file and folder it is also possible to obtain its CRC32, MD5, SHA-1 and Whirlpool hash sum. Extensive number of options allows to completely customize the visual look of the output. Filter on file name, date, size or attributes can be applied so it is possible to limit the files listed.

Apache Tika Apache Tika extracts metadata from a wide range of file formats and normalizes metadata keys to Dublin Core when possible. In recent versions of Tika, we have focused on extracting more information about "authors" (original author, comment authors, last-saved-by, editors, etc.) in general formats and more granular information for to/from/bcc info in .msg files. We've also added extraction of "original paths," when available, that might allow examiners to see the full path that the file or its attachments were stored. Finally, we've enriched extraction from XMP to allow identification of uuids and ancestor uuids. Tika can run in batch mode from input directory to output directory, and we recommend the RecursiveParserWrapper (-J -t options in the commandline app or /rmeta endpoint in tika-server) to capture metadata from embedded documents.