If you search for the string "Exif" you will find the start of the Exif data -- it s quite complicated, and I would recommend using a library -- (e.g. my company s DotImage if you were using .NET).

Here s a high level description though:

The Exif itself is inside of an AppMarker -- the three bytes before will be E1 (AppMarker 1) and the size of the marker s data in the endianness of the file. Two bytes after the Exif you will see the endianness marker (e.g. 49 49 means II which means Intel, little endian -- that means that 2 bytes numbers have the low byte first in the file).

The rest of the data uses offsets extensively, the offset is from the location of the first endian byte (the 49 in the above case)

8 bytes from this offset is a 2-byte number which is the number of exif tags. If you are in II byte order, reverse the bytes to read the length.

Then there will be this number of 12 byte records. Each one is:

2 bytes: Tag ID
2 bytes: Tag Type
4 bytes: Length
4 bytes: data if the data is 4 bytes or less, or an offset to the data

After the N 12 byte records, you will have the data pointed to by each offset used in the above N records. You need to look up ids and types to see what they mean and how they are represented.

I m a bit late to the party, but having written a Java library for processing Exif (among other types of metadata) I thought I d chime in.

Exif

Exif is built upon TIFF, the Tagged Image File Format. So we first have to examine TIFF:

• A TIFF document contains multiple directories known as IFDs (Image File Directories)
• Each IFD contains zero or more tags
• IFDs may link to zero or more other IFDs
• Each tag has a numeric ID and contains zero or more values of a specified data type

Think of the structure as a tree with primitive values at the leaves. TIFF is self describing about its structure, but it doesn t dictate anything about what the values at the leaves actually mean.

Really you can store any kind of data in TIFF, it s not coupled to images.

The TIFF file has a generic header:

• 2 bytes for byte ordering, either MM or II in ASCII. This tells you what order to consider all the future bytes in -- LSB or MSB first.
• 2 bytes TIFF marker, for Exif this is 0x002A
• 4 bytes pointer to first IFD

IFDs have equally simple structure:

• 2 bytes for the number of tags to follow
• N bytes for the tags themselves (where N = 12 * tagCount)
• 4 bytes for optional pointer to next IFD (use zero value if no IFD is linked)

Tags have a simple representation in 12 bytes:

• 2 bytes for the tag ID
• 2 bytes for the data type (int8u, int16s, float, etc)
• 4 bytes for the number of data values of the specified type
• 4 bytes for the value itself, if it fits, otherwise for a pointer to another location where the data may be found -- this could be a pointer to the beginning of another IFD

The data types are predefined. For example: 1 represents 8-bit unsigned integers, and 12 represents 64-bit floating point numbers.

So with all that you can go ahead and follow the data file. Some observations:

• You cannot read the data in order, as it is free to link all over the place. You must either have random access, or else synthesize it by buffering.
• All you know at this point is that a tag with ID 0x1234 has 4 integers: {1,2,3,4}

To decode TIFF into Exif, you need to apply the dictionary that defines what each IFD represents, and what each tag ID within those IFDs represent.

JPEG

Most users of my library are processing JPEG files. JPEGs have a completely different structure, comprising a sequence of segments. Each segment has an identifier and a block of bytes. Exif is found in the APP1 (numeric value 0xe1) segment of a JPEG file. Once you have that, you must skip past a few leading bytes (Exif) before seeing the MM or II that denote the start of the TIFF formatted Exif data.

Bringing it all together with an example

Here s a binary dump of one of my library s sample images:

In order:

JPEG Starts

• FF D8 is the JPEG magic number .
• FF marks a JPEG segment start.
• E1 indicates the JPEG segment type (this is APP1, where Exif lives).
• 18 B3 (6,323 decimal) gives the length of the segment (including the size bytes), so we know that all the Exif data for this JPG file will sit within the next 6,321 bytes. Note that in JPG, multi-byte values are encoded with Motorolla ordering, although nested Exif data may use Intel ordering.
• 45 78 69 66 00 00 or in ASCII Exif is the Exif preamble. APP1 is not exclusively reseved for Exif, so this discriminates.

TIFF/Exif Starts

• 4D 4D or MM indicates we have Motorolla byte order in this Exif block
• 00 2A is our standard TIFF marker, as discussed above
• 00 00 00 08 is the offset (8 bytes) to the first IFD, relative to the TIFF header (MM in this case). This points directly to the next byte in the sequence in this case, though it doesn t have to.

IFD Starts

• 00 08 opens our first IFD and tells we ll have 8 tags coming up

Tag Starts

• 01 0F is the ID for the first tag in the first IFD, in this case the manufacturer of the camera
• 00 02 is the type of the value (2 means it s an ASCII string)
• 00 00 00 16 is the number of components, meaning we ll have a 22-byte string
• 00 00 01 B2 (434 decimal) is a pointer to the location of that string, relative to the TIFF header (MM). You can t see it in this screenshot, but it points to 45 41 53 54 4D 41 4E 20 4B 4F 44 41 4B 20 43 4F 4D 50 41 4E 59 00 which is EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY in ASCII

RAW

Camera raw files (CR2/NEF/ORW...) generally use TIFF, however they mostly use different tags to those for Exif. The second pair of bytes in these files will be different to 00 2A as well, indicating the type of TIFF dictionary that ought to be applied.

Wikipedia has a few pointers on how and where exactly EXIF data is stored in a file. Of course, there s always the standard itself to read up.

This is one of the good libraries for Java and EXIF: http://www.drewnoakes.com/code/exif/

It s pretty tedious to parse EXIF data but you can find many libraries to parse it. My favorite one for Java is,

http://www.java2s.com/Open-Source/Java-Document/Web-Server/Jigsaw/org/w3c/tools/jpeg/Exif.java.htm

http://jigsaw.w3.org/