Multipart tiff and EXIF metadata

Question

In the tif format, when you add EXIF meta data it creates an new IFD (tif-direcory) and stores the exif metadata as fields. So when parsing a tif file with a single image and exif data is easy. But you can get multipart tiffs, where a tif can contain more then one image, the question is can each of these images have EXIF data? Does this create a new IFD for each pictures metadata?

What is is the arrangement of the IFD's then?

The tif specification doesn't go into any detail, I know that when a single image tif file has EXIF data there is an offset field to the EXIF data, so I can jump to that location and do the parsing myself, but the Java Sanselan library gives me easy access to the EXIF IFD and fields, but if it is possible to multiple EXIF IFD's (one for each image) then the library doesn't tell me to which image the data belongs.

If you cannot have more then 1 EXIF IFD in a multipart tif file, then it'll be trivial! In other words: Do I need to go to the effort of manually parsing the exif data? Because I only need to do this if you can attach EXIF data to each image inside a multipart tif.

Or does anyone know of a good Linux app that allows me to add EXIF data to tif files so I can figure it out for myself?

Answer 1

You probably want to check out ExifTool. It works pretty well for what I use it on (JPEGs), but I've never used it with TIFF files containing multiple images. Also check ImageMagick, he has a ton of useful tools.

Answer 2

Thanks I'll take a look, I've used imagemagick, I can use it to make multipart tiffs, but couldn't add EXIF data, tho I'll take a closer look! Maybe I'm missed a switch or something.