2010.03.19 12:12 "[Tiff] Reading metadata", by Magnus Bergman jamtli

I'm writing an application which reads metadata from quite large amounts of image-files (a hundred or so at a time). This can be done in a generic way using either gdk-pixbuf (included in GTK+) or GNU libextractor. Both of these uses libtiff then reading metadata from tiff-images. The problem is that libtiff has no API to read the metadata without both reading and decoding the whole image. This is very significant for my application since it's often used on tiff-images of sizes near 100MB each. What I did was to detect tiff-images in advance and handled them specially by accessing the tags directly. This was quite simple and solved the problem, but it was more of a workaround than a real solution. The functionality of accessing the tags directly should rather go in:

1) Be a part of the libtiff library.

2) Go into the metadata reading libraries (gdk-pixbuf, GNU libextractor and probably others).

Are there any opinions on this?