I'm sure there are several libraries for handling EXIF data. Haven't we discussed this before?
_____ Ian Thomas Victoria Park, Western Australia From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Greg Keogh Sent: Friday, December 28, 2012 2:23 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: Image Exif updating Hi folks, just a heads-up I found during holiday coding. I have a SQLite+EF4+WPF app over thousands of family photos and images. As you'd expect, I extract the Exif data using PropertyItem collection and put it in the tables, so the DB simply acts like a huge index over the images. You can also add captions and comments to pictures, but they go into the table and not into the image itself. I thought I'd spend an hour or so updating the app so that the captions and comments text was stored in the Exif items in the images (just like ratings go into the ID3 tags in my mp3 files). It turns out it's not so simple. Hundreds of people have trivial sample code to extract the Exif items, but I can't easily find any samples of updating. I find that the PropertyItem class has no constructor, so I read people "steal" an existing one and update it, or clone it, and then I see complaints that this technique does and doesn't sometimes work. Then I see complaints that updating the Exif items and saving the image re-encodes the images, although some people claim to have workarounds for this. Finally I find some dense and unfamilar code that use BitmapEncoder classes that perhaps do what I need, but there are more arguments about if it works correctly. So afer a couple of hours of browsing hundreds of websites and code samples I decide that it's more suffering than I need during a holiday break. It would take more hours of test coding and suffering to find what actually works, so I officially decide "f**k it all". If someone has been through this before and knows of a magic trick for easily and reliably updating image Exif items without the danger of information loss due to re-encoding, then I'm all ears. Cheers, Greg P.S. Each Xmas break I usually perform a PC upgrade, but I'm still happy with my one year old donk and I couldn't face the estimated 5 x 15 hour days of work to migrate to Win8 on an SSD. I've got Win8 and VS2012 in a VMPlayer and I think I'll just leave it there for now. The cost and time of upgrading my primary Windows OS is bloating each year.
