I was slightly surprised that google didn't turn up a solution to this one right off the bat, but it didn't, so here's my solution. I needed to extract metadata from some images, specifically the stuff which Windows Vista lets you edit from within the explorer - author, title, comments, that sort of thing. A quick check with PS suggests that these fields map variously back to the IPTC (IIM, legacy) and IPTC Core Exif fields; so long as you know which is which you can set the data in either place.

I recall from earlier work that IIS6 doesn'tnecessarily behave the same as IIS7 regarding the way the file system (NTFS) handles and presents extended properties; these days all my stuff is on the newer system so I don't care about IIS6.

There's not much to this, but you need to figure out which fields are which... I did this for the fields I care about in the code below. The file's data is utf-16 coded, which is slightly fiddily to deal with too.

 

/// <summary>
 /// Class to read exif (MS Vista NTFS format - there are lots of formats) from an image file.
 /// Reads the image data in once and parses it, then presents the results as properties of this class.
 /// </summary>
     private class ImageData
    {
        public string Title, Comments, Author, Name;

        /// <summary>
         /// Open the image and save the exif data I want.
         /// </summary>
         public ImageData(string shortName, string fileName)
        {
            Name = shortName.Replace(".jpg", "");    // Save this, so ...
             Title = Name;                            // if no explicit title, use the filename as a title.
            PropertyItem[] metadata = GetExifProperties(fileName);
            foreach (PropertyItem item in metadata)

            {
                // Drop last 2 bytes, which are garbage.
                 string utf16String = UnicodeEncoding.Unicode.GetString(item.Value, 0, item.Len-2);

                switch (item.Id)
                {
                    // These I found by trial and error.
                     case 0x9C9B:
                        Title = utf16String;
                        break;
                    case 0x9C9C:
                        Comments = utf16String;
                        break;
                    case 0x9C9D:
                        Author = utf16String;
                        break;
                    default:
                        break;
                }
            }

        }

        public static PropertyItem[] GetExifProperties(string fileName)
        {
            using (FileStream stream = new FileStream(fileName, FileMode.Open, FileAccess.Read))
                using (System.Drawing.Image image = System.Drawing.Image.FromStream(stream))
                    return image.PropertyItems;
        }
    }

 

Use it like this, to instantiate a class which allows you to read the "Title" and other attributes."item" is a FileInfo object.

  ImageData imgData = new ImageData( item.Name, item.FullName );