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I have a series of nested folders in a Windows 7 operating system, all holding files. The files are Word and Excel. I would like to extract the Authors, Owner, Date Modified, and Date Created metadata field from each file, and output to a text file.

My first attempt to do this involved using PowerShell. The code presented by the OP here works great, but does not recurse through the folders. I experimented with various ways of combining 'Get-ChildItem' with the funMetadata function, but was unable to do so. Since it didn't work for the OP, and there were no solutions offered by the SO community, it seemed unwise to try to continue to try and fix this code. Instead, I focused on modifying the OP's solution (below) by substituting my own metadata fields, but the output text file simply says "Authors" followed by a blank page. Here's what I tried:

(navigate to root folder): Get-ChildItem -Recurse | Select-Object Authors | Out-file "C:\text5.txt"

(By the way, the metadata definitely exists within the files - I know this by using the OP's original, not-able-to-recurse script).

Trying a different tack, I downloaded two python modules - hachoir and oletools - but once I got them installed, I did not know where to start. It doesn't seem as if there is any documentation.

Does anyone have advice for me?

EDIT: I just found some new info here, and this is probably a duplicate question. I hate to delete it now though, in case someone's working on an answer. Apologies for any confusion

Community
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oymonk
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1 Answers1

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You still can use PowerShell, you just needed to tie everything together to loop through all of your files.

$RootFolder = "C:\example"
$files = Get-ChildItem $RootFolder -Recurse
foreach ($file in $files) { 
    $Folder = Split-Path $File.FullName
    $FileName = Split-Path $File.FullName -Leaf
    $Shell = New-Object -ComObject Shell.Application
    $FolderObject = $Shell.namespace($Folder)
    $FileObject = $FolderObject.ParseName($FileName)
    $FolderObject.GetDetailsOf($FileObject,-1)
}

Note: The object returned by Get-ChildItem doesn't have the author metadata, so when you use Select-Object it creates a blank property.

BenH
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  • Thank you so much @BenH - this works great! I put | Out-file C:\metadata6.txt -Append after your "-1)" to get a text file. One thing is odd though: For half the files extracted, there is no "title" metadata. Do you know why this might be the case? The majority of these non-titled entries were in a subfolder. – oymonk Feb 23 '17 at 06:11
  • I do not know why. The `GetDetailsOf` method should pull all of the non-blank fields. Also if an answer worked for you then it is best practice to accept it. – BenH Feb 23 '17 at 14:17