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I was searching for some image metadata handling library with following requirements:

  • support EXIF, IPTC and XMP
  • support fast reading of metadata tags (e.g. for batch loading of image thumbnails with annotations)
  • support writing metadata tags
  • support both standard and RAW image formats

I found several candidates, but each has some flaw:

  • WIC - metadata support is on per-codec basis, not possible to extract XMP or EXIF metadata from PNGs and other formats; RAW codecs may not support metadata consistently
  • Exiv2 - the C# wrapper is quite old and there are problems on 64bit platforms
  • FreeImage - image has to be loaded in order to read metadata
  • Exiftool - excellent, but written in Perl and only the command-line app can be used from .NET - loading info for many images can be very slow
  • XmpUtils - unable to extract EXIF tags from other than JPEG files (tried on PNGs)

I am working on photo-management application which needs to have excellent image metadata support...

Libor
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    I maintain a feature rich library for reading image metadata at https://github.com/drewnoakes/metadata-extractor-dotnet – Drew Noakes Sep 24 '15 at 22:13

2 Answers2

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I had the exact same needs couple years ago and ended up writing an application that reads and writes metadata to IPTC, XMP, EXIF and IFD namespaces. The application can handle both single and batch images. It is written in C#, WPF. You can get the code from here.

muruge
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Leadtools might work for you. I've had pretty good luck with it, although I had to write my own classes to decipher makernotes.

xpda
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