Temporarily adds a directory to the environmental variable PATH for system calls from within R. This allows Windows users to store exiftool.exe anywhere on their hard drive and is useful if they cannot store the file in system directories. It is not needed on Linux or MacOS machines.
addToPath(directory)character. the directory in the file system to add to PATH (e.g. the directory containing exiftool.exe).
invisible logical indicating whether directory was added to
PATH successfully (in the running R process).
Several functions within this package depend on ExifTool. Under Windows, exiftool.exe cannot be used if it is not in a directory path specified in PATH. This can be solved by adding the directory containing exiftool.exe for temporary use within the running R process. It can also be useful in other contexts besides Exiftool.
The directories in PATH can be queried by Sys.getenv("PATH").
exiftool_dir <- "C:/Path/To/Exiftool"
addToPath(directory = exiftool_dir)
# check if it has been added to PATH
grepl(exiftool_dir, Sys.getenv("PATH"))
#> [1] TRUE