Wrapping Linux EXIF tools in Java
In a small project to archive digital images, I used Apache Commons Imaging which worked quite well. Eventually I decided to switch to use Linux command line tools wrapped in Java. The reasons for this decision:
commons-imagingsupports many different file types and metadata formats. Due to this high level of abstraction, the usage seems a little cumbersome for me.commons-imagingstill is pre version 1 and there is not much activity. No offence, I know maintaining Open Source stuff in your spare time can be a hard job, but it seems to me that not many people are using the software.- I once had a major f***-up in my digital image archive (I was able to restore it thanks to a good backup strategy). I guess it was rather my fault than the library's, but it was really hard to figure out what went wrong. Long story short, it had to do with encoding...
As I am used to smart little Linux tools like exiftool I decided to switch to using them. As I wanted to have some caching, I came up with the idea of wrapping it in a Java lib. Let's go...