So, like any good programmer, I have the camel on my bookshelf where the allmighty Larry asserts (p. 609) that laziness is the first great virtue of a programmer. Not to be a virtue-less programmer, I was off the teh googlez to search for an EXIF library.
I figured that it's bound to have come up before and lo and behold I found many a library. Most did pretty much what I wanted, but this is for a web app and every single library left a lock on the file after it was done executing. I guess I could have restarted the app pool after every page load, but that seemed a bit excessive.
I poked around MSDN and saw that it wasn't that difficult to read it by myself.
So, I wrote my own chunk of code:
b = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(fileInfo.FullName)
Dim encoding As New System.Text.ASCIIEncoding()
for each pi in b.PropertyItems
if pi.ID = 40091 then ' I only need the title
description = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetString(pi.value)
exit for
end if
Next
and viola, EXIF data.
Sidebar here: I am a c# guy. I cannot stand using vb. but, DotNetNuke is written in vb so, I don't have much of a choice (I'm not rolling a new class for 15 lines of code)
But, with the EXIF data came the aforementioned file lock.
Back to MSDN to poke around at the Image Class. Skip down a bit and lookie lookie it implements IDisposible. Oh boy, is it really this easy?
yes, in fact it is.
using b = new System.Drawing.Bitmap(fileInfo.FullName)
Dim encoding As New System.Text.ASCIIEncoding()
for each pi in b.PropertyItems
if pi.ID = 40091 then
description = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode.GetString(pi.value)
exit for
end if
Next
End Using
Game, set, match.
