How to get the EXIF data from a file using C

Question

I would like to write a small program in C  which goes through my jpeg photos and  for example  sorts them into dated folders  using MY dating conventions  dammit        Does anyone know a relatively easy way to get at the EXIF data such as Date And Time or Exposure programatically  Thanks

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Recently  I used this  NET Metadata API  I have also written a blog post about it  that shows reading  updating  and removing the EXIF data from images using C   using  Metadata metadata   new Metadata  quot image jpg quot          IExif root   metadata GetRootPackage   as IExif      if  root    null  amp  amp  root ExifPackage    null                Console WriteLine root ExifPackage DateTime

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Getting EXIF data from a JPEG image involves    Seeking to the JPEG markers which mentions the beginning of the EXIF data   e g  normally oxFFE1 is the marker inserted while encoding EXIF data  which is a APPlication segment  where EXIF data goes    Parse all the data from say 0xFFE1 to 0xFFE2   This data would be stream of bytes  in the JPEG encoded file    ASCII equivalent of these bytes would contain various information related to Image Date  Camera Model Name  Exposure etc

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The command line tool ExifTool by Phil Harvey works with dozens of images formats - including plenty of proprietary RAW formats - and can manipulate a variety of metadata formats including EXIF  GPS  IPTC  XMP  JFIF   Very easy to use  lightweight  impressive application

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As suggested  you can use some 3rd party library  or do it manually  which is not that much work   but the simplest and the most flexible is to perhaps use the built-in functionality in  NET  For more see    System Drawing Image PropertyItems Property System Drawing Imaging PropertyItem Class  How to  Read Image Metadata   I say  it   s the most flexible  because  NET does not try to interpret or coalesce the data in any way  For each EXIF you basically get an array of bytes  This may be good or bad depending on how much control you actually want   Also  I should point out that the property list does not in fact directly correspond to the EXIF values  EXIF itself is stored in multiple tables with overlapping ID   s  but  NET puts everything in one list and redefines ID   s of some items  But as long as you don   t care about the precise EXIF ID   s  you should be fine with the  NET mapping     Edit  It s possible to do it without loading the full image following this answer  https   stackoverflow com a 552642 2097240

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Check out this metadata extractor  It is written in Java but has also been ported to C   I have used the Java version to write a small utility to rename my jpeg files based on the date and model tags  Very easy to use     EDIT metadata-extractor supports  NET too  It s a very fast and simple library for accessing metadata from images and videos   It fully supports Exif  as well as IPTC  XMP and many other types of metadata from file types including JPEG  PNG  GIF  PNG  ICO  WebP  PSD       var directories   ImageMetadataReader ReadMetadata imagePath       print out all metadata foreach  var directory in directories  foreach  var tag in directory Tags      Console WriteLine    directory Name  -  tag Name     tag Description         access the date time var subIfdDirectory   directories OfType lt ExifSubIfdDirectory gt    FirstOrDefault    var dateTime   subIfdDirectory  GetDateTime ExifDirectoryBase TagDateTime     It s available via NuGet and the code s on GitHub

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Here is a link to another similar SO question  which has an answer pointing to this good article on  Reading  writing and photo metadata  in  Net

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You can use TagLib  which is used by applications such as F-Spot  Besides Exif  it will read a good amount of metadata formats for image  audio and video   I also like ExifUtils API but it is buggy and is not actively developed

User · Answer

Image class has PropertyItems and PropertyIdList properties  You can use them

[c#] How to get the EXIF data from a file using C#

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