Easily and efficiently read metadata from images, video and audio files.
MetadataExtractor reads Exif, IPTC, XMP, ICC, Photoshop, WebP, PNG, BMP, GIF, ICO, PCX metadata from JPEG, TIFF WebP, PSD, PNG, BMP, GIF, ICO, PCX and camera RAW files.
MOV and related QuickTime video formats such as MP4, M4V, 3G2, 3GP are supported, as are MP3 and WAV audio files.
Camera manufacturer specific support exists for Agfa, Canon, Casio, DJI, Epson, Fujifilm, Kodak, Kyocera, Leica, Minolta, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic, Pentax, Reconyx, Sanyo, Sigma/Foveon and Sony models.
The resulting directories sequence holds potentially many different directories of metadata, depending upon the input image.
To print out all values from all directories:
foreach (var directory in directories)
foreach (var tag in directory.Tags)
Console.WriteLine($"{directory.Name} - {tag.Name} = {tag.Description}");
Producing:
Exif SubIFD - Exposure Time = 1/60 sec
Exif SubIFD - F-Number = f/8.0
...
Exif IFD0 - Make = NIKON CORPORATION
Exif IFD0 - Model = NIKON D70
...
IPTC - Credit = Drew Noakes
IPTC - City = London
...
Access a specific value, in this case the Exif DateTime tag:
var subIfdDirectory = directories.OfType<ExifSubIfdDirectory>().FirstOrDefault();
var dateTime = subIfdDirectory?.GetDescription(ExifDirectoryBase.TagDateTime);
Features
The library understands several formats of metadata, many of which may be present in a single image:
net35 and net45 target the full .NET Framework. net45 uses the newer IReadOnlyList<> on some public APIs where net35 uses IList<>. Internally net45 also uses some newer library features for slightly improved performance.
netstandard1.3 implements version 1.3 of the .NET Standard which covers .NET Core, Mono, Xamarin platforms, UWP, and future platforms.
A PCL build was supported until version 1.5.3 which supported Silverlight 5.0, Windows 8.0, Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows Phone Silverlight 8.0. PCL versions did not support file-system metadata due to restricted IO APIs.
Building
Building this repo requires a recent version of Visual Studio 2022. Ensure you have the .NET Core Development Tools workload installed via the Visual Studio Installer.
The library itself, once built, may be consumed from projects in much earlier versions of Visual Studio.
Questions & Feedback
The quickest way to have your questions answered is via Stack Overflow.
Check whether your question has already been asked, and if not, ask a new one tagged with both metadata-extractor and .net.
Bugs and feature requests should be provided via the project's issue tracker.
Please attach sample images where possible as most issues cannot be investigated without an image.
Contributing
If you want to get your hands dirty, making a pull request is a great way to enhance the library.
In general it's best to create an issue first that captures the problem you want to address.
You can discuss your proposed solution in that issue.
This gives others a chance to provide feedback before you spend your valuable time working on it.
An easier way to help is to contribute to the sample image file library used for research and testing.
Credits
This library is developed by Drew Noakes and contributors.
Thanks are due to the many users who sent in suggestions, bug reports,
sample images from their cameras as well as encouragement.
Wherever possible, they have been credited in the source code and commit logs.
This library was originally written in Java in 2002.
In 2014, Yakov Danilov (for Imazen LLC) converted the code to C# using Sharpen.
The code has subsequently been edited to provide a more idiomatic .NET API.
Both projects are now developed in unison and aim to be functionally equivalent.
Other languages
Java metadata-extractor is the original implementation of this project, from which this .NET version was ported
