Thread: Reading Exif data from PNG file

Hi there,

I'm trying to read Exif data from PNG files but hit a brick wall, and the lack of or poor documentation is just frustrating.

Originally I just wanted to tinker around with dithering for reducing bit-depth in pictures, and it all kind of spiralled out of control with adding support for PNG and JPEG, and now finally wanting to preserve meta-data across file formats as good as possible. ;o)

The Exif data in PNGs is stored in a "Raw profile type exif" text chunk and looks like this:

Code:

exif
    5156
45786966000049492a00080000000b000001040001000000640000000101040001000000
430000000201030003000000920000000f01020009000000980000001001020005000000
a20000001a01050001000000a80000001b01050001000000b00000002801030001000000
...

which seems to be hexadecimal representation of binary data (no docs found about that).

Converting that to binary seems promising, I get a block of binary data starting with "Exif".

So I figured I could just feed that binary data to libexif, but no luck. (and again, no useful documentation)

From the little documentation found on EXIF library (libexif) API: The libexif library I expected to simply do:

Code:

ExifLoader *loader = exif_loader_new();
exif_loader_write(loader, rawdata, len);
ExifData *data = exif_loader_get_data(loader);

But no luck, just a NULL return value.

Does anybody here have any experience with this?

I stripped down the code to just the bare minimum but it's still ~300 lines, so I am attaching it instead of pasting it all in here. (along with a small sample PNG file).
Needs libexif and libpng to compile

Code:

sudo apt-get install libpng-dev libexif-dev
gcc -std=c99 pngexif.c -lpng -lexif

Thanks a bunch,

Rupert

Hi, thanks for your ninput.

The eXIf chunk you are citing is relatively new and doesn't seem to be in widespread use.
Instead, Exif info is commonly stored as a text chunk named "Raw profile type exif" as described above. (That is also where e.g. GIMP will store Exif data.)

So far I haven't had a PNG file yet with eXIf chunk, but I somehow suspect that I'd end up in the same place anyway.

Played with it a bit more, and at least I figured out how to get error messages from libexif now:

Code:

libexif (ExifLoader): Scanning 5156 byte(s) of data...
libexif (ExifLoader): The data supplied does not seem to contain EXIF data.


exif_loader_write() returned 0
exif_loader_get_data() failed

I then tried to let libexif read the whole file instead of just feeding it the Exif part.
It works for JPEGs, but not for PNGs. (Same error message as above).

So I guess it's not a C programming question, but rather a compatibility issue with libexif.
Oh, well.