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...

.net image metadata exif
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