Reading data metadata from JPEG, XMP or EXIF in C#

Question

I've been looking around for a decent way of reading metadata (specifically, the date taken) from JPEG files in C#, and am coming up a little short. Existing information, as far as I can see, shows code like the following;

BitmapMetadata bmd = (BitmapMetadata)frame.Metadata;
string a1 = (string)bmd.GetQuery("/app1/ifd/exif:{uint=36867}");

But in my ignorance I have no idea what bit of metadata GetQuery() will return, or what to pass it.

I want to attempt reading XMP first, falling back to EXIF if XMP does not exist. Is there a simple way of doing this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

My company makes a .NET toolkit that includes XMP and EXIF parsers.

The typical process is something like this:

XmpParser parser = new XmpParser();
System.Xml.XmlDocument xml = (System.Xml.XmlDocument)parser.ParseFromImage(stream, frameIndex);

for EXIF you would do this:

ExitParser parser = new ExifParser();
ExifCollection exif = parser.ParseFromImage(stream, frameIndex);

obviously, frameIndex would be 0 for JPEG.

Answer 2

The following seems to work nicely, but if there's something bad about it, I'd appreciate any comments.

    public string GetDate(FileInfo f)
    {
        FileStream fs = new FileStream(f.FullName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read, FileShare.Read);
        BitmapSource img = BitmapFrame.Create(fs);
        BitmapMetadata md = (BitmapMetadata)img.Metadata;
        string date = md.DateTaken;
        Console.WriteLine(date);
        return date;
    }

Answer 3

Similar question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/58649/how-to-get-the-exif-data-from-a-file-using-c

Answer 4

I think what you are doing is a good solution because the System.DateTaken handler automatically applies Photo metadata policy of falling back to other namespaces to find if a value exist.

Thanks,

Murugesh.