How to Extract Metadata from SVG Vector Files

SVG is an XML-based vector image format, which means its metadata is embedded directly in the file as readable text. Unlike binary image formats where metadata hides in encoded headers, SVG metadata sits in plain XML elements and attributes you can open in any text editor.

SVG files can contain several distinct categories of metadata:

• Descriptive elements: The <title> and <desc> tags provide human-readable names and descriptions for the entire image or individual elements within it
• The <metadata> element: A dedicated container for structured metadata, typically holding Dublin Core properties wrapped in RDF/XML
• Root attributes: The <svg> root element carries viewBox, width, height, xmlns declarations, and version information
• Editor namespaces: Tools like Inkscape add inkscape:* and sodipodi:* attributes, while Adobe Illustrator embeds its own i:* and x:xmpmeta blocks
• Embedded resources: Font references via @font-face or <font> elements, linked images through <image> tags, and script references

A single SVG file exported from Inkscape might contain the document title, a description, the author's name in Dublin Core format, the Inkscape version, layer names, grid settings, and named views for different zoom levels. An SVG exported from Illustrator often includes XMP metadata with creation dates, modification timestamps, and color profile information.

Over 65% of all websites now use SVG for icons, logos, and illustrations according to W3Techs. That widespread adoption means web developers, designers, and asset managers regularly need to read, extract, or clean this metadata for accessibility audits, SEO optimization, license tracking, and file size reduction. For design teams managing SVG libraries at scale, Fastio's workspaces add collaboration and AI-powered metadata extraction to your asset stack.

Understanding the XML structure of an SVG file makes extraction straightforward. Here is a typical SVG with metadata from multiple sources:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg"
     xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
     xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
     xmlns:inkscape="http://www.inkscape.org/namespaces/inkscape"
     xmlns:sodipodi="http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/DTD/sodipodi-0.dtd"
     viewBox="0 0 800 600"
     width="800" height="600"
     version="1.1">
  <title>Company Logo</title>
  <desc>Primary brand logo for use on light backgrounds</desc>
  <metadata>
    <rdf:RDF>
      <rdf:Description>
        <dc:title>Company Logo</dc:title>
        <dc:creator>Design Team</dc:creator>
        <dc:rights>Copyright 2026 Example Corp</dc:rights>
        <dc:date>2026-03-15</dc:date>
      </rdf:Description>
    </rdf:RDF>
  </metadata>
  <sodipodi:namedview inkscape:window-width="1920"
                      inkscape:window-height="1080"
                      inkscape:zoom="1.5"/>
  <!-- graphic elements below -->
</svg>

The Three Metadata Layers

Layer 1: Root attributes. The <svg> element itself carries the viewBox (coordinate system), width and height (display dimensions), version, and all namespace declarations. The viewBox="0 0 800 600" tells you the internal coordinate space is 800 units wide and 600 units tall.

Layer 2: Descriptive elements. The <title> and <desc> elements can appear as children of the root <svg> or as children of individual shapes and groups. Browsers use <title> for tooltips, and screen readers use both elements for accessibility. The SVG specification allows multiple <title> and <desc> elements throughout the document, each describing its parent element.

Layer 3: The <metadata> block. This is where structured metadata lives. The W3C SVG specification recommends placing at most one <metadata> element per parent, and it should appear before other child elements. Inside, you will typically find Dublin Core properties wrapped in RDF/XML, though any XML namespace is allowed. Creative Commons license information, XMP data, and custom application metadata all belong here.

Since SVG is plain XML, you can extract metadata without specialized image processing software. Standard XML tools work well, and ExifTool handles SVG as a supported format.

ExifTool

ExifTool reads SVG metadata out of the box. It parses the XML structure and returns title, description, viewBox dimensions, and any XMP or Dublin Core data it finds.

exiftool logo.svg

This outputs fields like SVG Version, Image Width, Image Height, View Box, Title, Description, and any XMP metadata present. For batch extraction across a directory:

exiftool -csv -r ./svg-assets/ > svg-metadata.csv

The -csv flag produces tabular output suitable for spreadsheets, and -r recurses into subdirectories.

xmllint and xmlstarlet

For precise extraction of specific elements, XML command-line tools give you full XPath control.

Extract the title element with xmllint:

xmllint --xpath "//*[local-name()='title']/text()" logo.svg

Extract Dublin Core metadata with xmlstarlet:

xmlstarlet sel -N dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" \
  -t -v "//dc:creator" -n \
  -t -v "//dc:rights" -n \
  logo.svg

Extract the viewBox attribute:

xmlstarlet sel -t -v "//*[local-name()='svg']/@viewBox" logo.svg

These tools are available on most Linux distributions and through Homebrew on macOS. They handle namespace-aware queries that simple text tools like grep would struggle with, especially when the same namespace prefix maps to different URIs across files.

grep for Quick Checks

When you just need a fast sanity check, grep can pull out common metadata patterns:

grep -oP '(?<=<title>).*(?=</title>)' logo.svg
grep -oP 'viewBox="[^"]*"' logo.svg

This breaks on multi-line elements and namespace-prefixed tags, so use it only for quick spot checks, not production pipelines.

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Python's XML libraries make SVG metadata extraction easy to script and automate. The standard library's xml.etree.ElementTree handles simple cases, while lxml provides full XPath 1.0 support and better namespace handling.

Basic Extraction with ElementTree

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET

tree = ET.parse("logo.svg")
root = tree.getroot()

### SVG namespace
ns = {"svg": "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg",
      "dc": "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/",
      "rdf": "http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"}

### Root attributes
viewbox = root.get("viewBox")
width = root.get("width")
height = root.get("height")
print(f"viewBox: {viewbox}, width: {width}, height: {height}")

### Title and description
title = root.find("svg:title", ns)
desc = root.find("svg:desc", ns)
print(f"Title: {title.text if title is not None else 'None'}")
print(f"Description: {desc.text if desc is not None else 'None'}")

### Dublin Core from metadata block
creator = root.find(".//dc:creator", ns)
rights = root.find(".//dc:rights", ns)
if creator is not None:
    print(f"Creator: {creator.text}")
if rights is not None:
    print(f"Rights: {rights.text}")

Batch Processing with lxml

For processing hundreds or thousands of SVG files, lxml is faster and handles malformed XML more gracefully:

from lxml import etree
from pathlib import Path
import csv

NS = {"svg": "http://www.w3.org/2000/svg",
      "dc": "http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/",
      "inkscape": "http://www.inkscape.org/namespaces/inkscape"}

def extract_svg_metadata(filepath):
    tree = etree.parse(str(filepath))
    root = tree.getroot()

def text_or_none(xpath):
        result = root.xpath(xpath, namespaces=NS)
        return result[0].text if result else None

return {
        "file": filepath.name,
        "viewBox": root.get("viewBox"),
        "width": root.get("width"),
        "height": root.get("height"),
        "title": text_or_none("//svg:title"),
        "description": text_or_none("//svg:desc"),
        "creator": text_or_none("//dc:creator"),
        "rights": text_or_none("//dc:rights"),
        "inkscape_version": root.get(
            f"{{{NS['inkscape']}}}version"
        ),
    }

svg_files = Path("./assets").glob("**/*.svg")
rows = [extract_svg_metadata(f) for f in svg_files]

with open("svg_metadata.csv", "w", newline="") as f:
    writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=rows[0].keys())
    writer.writeheader()
    writer.writerows(rows)

This script walks a directory tree, extracts metadata from every SVG it finds, and writes a CSV report. The namespace-aware XPath queries handle files from Inkscape, Illustrator, Figma, and plain SVG exports without modification.

Handling Editor-Specific Namespaces

Different design tools embed different metadata. Inkscape uses sodipodi:* for page settings and inkscape:* for layer labels, zoom levels, and grid configurations. Adobe Illustrator wraps XMP metadata in x:xmpmeta blocks. Figma exports tend to be minimal, carrying just the root attributes and graphic elements.

To extract Inkscape layer names:

layers = root.xpath(
    "//svg:g[@inkscape:groupmode='layer']/@inkscape:label",
    namespaces=NS
)
print(f"Layers: {layers}")

To find all namespace URIs in an SVG (useful for identifying which tool created it):

for prefix, uri in root.nsmap.items():
    print(f"{prefix}: {uri}")

JavaScript handles SVG metadata extraction both in the browser and in Node.js. Since browsers natively parse SVG as part of the DOM, client-side extraction requires no external libraries.

Browser-Side Extraction

async function extractSvgMetadata(url) {
  const response = await fetch(url);
  const text = await response.text();
  const parser = new DOMParser();
  const doc = parser.parseFromString(text, "image/svg+xml");
  const svg = doc.documentElement;

return {
    viewBox: svg.getAttribute("viewBox"),
    width: svg.getAttribute("width"),
    height: svg.getAttribute("height"),
    title: doc.querySelector("title")?.textContent,
    description: doc.querySelector("desc")?.textContent,
  };
}

The DOMParser approach works for SVG files loaded from the same origin or from CORS-enabled servers. For SVGs already embedded in the page as inline <svg> elements, you can query them directly with document.querySelector.

Node.js Extraction

For server-side or build-step extraction, libraries like fast-xml-parser or cheerio parse SVG files without a browser DOM:

import { XMLParser } from "fast-xml-parser";
import { readFileSync } from "fs";

const parser = new XMLParser({
  ignoreAttributes: false,
  attributeNamePrefix: "@_",
});

const svg = readFileSync("logo.svg", "utf-8");
const parsed = parser.parse(svg);
const root = parsed.svg;

console.log("viewBox:", root["@_viewBox"]);
console.log("Title:", root.title);
console.log("Description:", root.desc);

For build systems that process SVG assets (icon sprite generators, design token extractors, accessibility linters), these Node.js approaches integrate cleanly into existing toolchains without adding heavy dependencies.

Extracting Metadata from SVG Sprites

Many web projects bundle icons into a single SVG sprite file using <symbol> elements. Each symbol can carry its own <title> and <desc>:

const symbols = doc.querySelectorAll("symbol");
for (const sym of symbols) {
  console.log({
    id: sym.getAttribute("id"),
    viewBox: sym.getAttribute("viewBox"),
    title: sym.querySelector("title")?.textContent,
    desc: sym.querySelector("desc")?.textContent,
  });
}

This is particularly useful for accessibility audits. Each icon in a sprite sheet should have a <title> for screen readers, and extracting the current state tells you which ones are missing.

SVG metadata adds file size and can leak information you do not want published. Editor-specific namespaces from Inkscape and Illustrator often double the file size without any visual effect. Before deploying SVG assets to production, cleaning metadata is standard practice.

SVGO (SVG Optimizer)

SVGO is the most widely used tool for cleaning SVG files. It removes editor metadata, collapses redundant groups, and optimizes path data:

npx svgo input.svg -o output.svg

SVGO's default configuration removes <metadata> elements, editor namespaces, comments, and unused namespace declarations. You can customize which plugins run. To keep <title> and <desc> for accessibility while removing everything else:

npx svgo input.svg -o output.svg \
  --config='{"plugins":[{"name":"preset-default","params":{"overrides":{"removeTitle":false,"removeDesc":false}}}]}'

Inkscape's "Save as Plain SVG"

Inkscape can strip its own metadata through File > Save As > Plain SVG. This removes sodipodi:* attributes, inkscape:* attributes, and the <sodipodi:namedview> element. It preserves the <title>, <desc>, and <metadata> elements since those are part of the SVG specification.

ExifTool for Metadata Removal

ExifTool can strip metadata while preserving the visual content:

exiftool -all= output.svg

This removes XMP, Dublin Core, and other embedded metadata blocks. The graphic elements remain unchanged.

Privacy Considerations

SVG files from design tools can contain information you might not expect to share:

• Author names and emails in Dublin Core metadata
• File paths in linked image references (e.g., /Users/designer/Desktop/texture.png)
• Font names that reveal your design system
• Creation and modification timestamps
• Inkscape grid and guide settings that show your design process

Run exiftool -v2 file.svg to see a detailed dump of everything embedded before sharing SVG files publicly.

When you manage hundreds or thousands of SVG files, individual extraction is not practical. You need a system that indexes metadata, tracks changes, and makes the data searchable.

Building a Metadata Index

The Python batch script from the earlier section is a starting point, but a proper asset pipeline needs persistent storage, change detection, and search. A common approach is to extract metadata on import and store it in a database or structured file that your asset management system queries.

For teams that need structured extraction without building custom pipelines, Fastio's Metadata Views automate this process. Upload SVG files to a workspace, describe the fields you want extracted in plain language (such as "title," "creator," "viewBox dimensions," and "license"), and the system populates a sortable, filterable spreadsheet. You can add new extraction columns later without reprocessing existing files.

This approach works well alongside local tools. Use SVGO to clean SVGs before deployment, ExifTool or Python scripts for pre-upload validation, and Metadata Views to maintain a searchable index of your production assets. The combination keeps your local workflow fast while giving your team a centralized view of asset metadata.

Workflow Integration

A practical SVG metadata workflow for a design team:

1. Export: Designer exports SVG from their tool (Figma, Inkscape, Illustrator)
2. Validate: A CI step runs ExifTool or a Python script to check that <title> and <desc> exist for accessibility
3. Optimize: SVGO strips editor metadata and reduces file size
4. Index: Upload to a shared workspace where metadata is extracted and searchable
5. Audit: Periodically review the metadata index to find files missing titles, descriptions, or license information

This pipeline catches accessibility gaps early, keeps production SVGs lean, and gives asset managers a searchable catalog without manual data entry.