Searching for Landsat-8 data

Hi

I am searching for cloud-free Landsat-8 scenes of sea ice in the arctic region. I am running the landsat-util in python. However, I have some questions.

I have read that there at some point was possible to use a shapefile to define the footprint or region of interest when searching. Is this feature removed? And if so, why? As for now, I iterate over the latitudes and longitudes covering my region of interest, but this procedure is quite slow. Is there a better way to do this? Secondly, is it possible to determine the metadata returned for the products found? As for now only the cloud-coverpercentage, date, path, row, sat_type, sceneID, and thumbnail link (which does not work) is returned. I would for instance like to extract the exact time of acquisition, exact footprint, and product id.

Hope to hear from someone,
Vebjørn