depix
Film scans and images are usualy shoved about in DPX files. These files embed a massive amount of metadata which can be used to automatically catalog and search in big file collections (and searching is essential since a complete feature film will run well into tens of thousands of files). Reading this metadata can easily help with cumbersome tasks like sorting DPX files per reel/timecode, resolution, selective copying/processing and such daily tasks.
Additionally, depix supports editing of DPX metadata without the need to copy the file over (since files can be big). The metadata gets modified in-place without any copy operations, which is especially helpful when operating across a network.
Usage
Simple example - print the resolution of all the DPX files in the directory
A bit more involved example - for two directories of similar DPX files, copy over the source timecode of the files
depix is also useable from the command line using the supplied binary depix-describe
Tip
Scanning tens of thousands of files is slow, not because Ruby is slow per se but because the disk is constantly on seek. It is recommended to cache the whole bulk of your metadata objects for later reuse, which is perfectly easy since Depix objects are serializable.