Link To Full Story: code.flickr.com
The standards
To begin with, there is not just EXIF. Metadata can actually be written within a picture file in at least 3 different formats:
- EXIF itself.
- IPTC-IIM headers.
- XMP by Adobe.
Of course, these formats are neither mutually exclusive nor completely redundant and this is where this can get tricky.
But let’s step back a moment to describe the specifics of these formats, not in details, but with regards to our need, which is to extract information in a reliable way, independently from how/when/where the image was created.
The EXIF is the oldest form
Hence, with the most limitations yet the most widespread, as this is often the case in our industry. Thus, we need to deal with it, even though it is radically flawed from an internationalization stand point: text fields are not stored using UTF and most of the time there is no indication of the character set encoding.
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