Can I use PIL, like in this example?
I only need to read the data, and I'm looking for the easiest simplest way to do it (I can't install pyexiv).
edit: I don't want to believe that the only way to do this is with some library (python-xmp-toolkit, pyexiv2, ...) that needs Exempi and Boost. There must be another option!
Shout out to Chris Sherwood for the solution that I used. Came here to find a way to pull XMP data from DJI Drone Images. I too did not want to install Exempi. So, for posterity, I pulled these easier methods together for those people looking to extract values from XMP headers without a lot of hassle-
# Extract XMP Data
f = open(image_files[i], 'rb')
d= f.read()
xmp_start = d.find(b'<x:xmpmeta')
xmp_end = d.find(b'</x:xmpmeta')
xmp_str = d[xmp_start:xmp_end+12]
# Extract Latitude
search_str = b'Latitude="'
value_start = xmp_str.find(search_str) + len(search_str)
value_end = xmp_str.find(b'"',value_start)
value = xmp_str[value_start:value_end]
lat = value.decode('UTF-8')