I can't seem to find any documentation of how to delete a tiff tag using the LibTiff.Net library. I love the library but this one method is important to what I need to do. At one point I was hoping that I could just set a tag and set it's value to nothing. I had hoped that would work but that was a negative.
Anyone know how to delete a tiff tag using the LibTiff.Net library?
Note: As first this might look like a big answer but I wanted to make sure that whoever was looking at this see's all the "proprietary classes I have created to keep everything boxed up for cleanness. In the interest of keeping the answer as sort as possible and to be informative I will only paste the code for the DeleteTiffTags method. The rest of the code can be downloaded via here.
Now on to the good stuff... I ended up spending about a day on making this happen and it was possible thanks to various questions being answered by the great stackoverflow community. I wrote two little (very detailed) method in one of my classes to delete a tiff tag. The first one is meant to delete a list of given tags and the second one is to delete a single tag which works off the for mentioned method. Also in this example I added a few lines to support my custom tiff tags... They will all be preceded with the //ADDED comment.
Classes:
public static class TIFFTAGS - This class is the main class that is simply called by doing something like TIFFTAGS.DeleteTiffTags(); Since it's a static class there is no need to create an object of it to use it's methods.
private class TIFFTAGS_PAGE - This class is a private class that resides inside the TIFFTAGS class. It's purpose is to contain all the single page info for all the pages that might be in the tiff. It is private and only used for internal purposes.
public class TIFFTAGS_TAG - This is a class I made to wrap up the tags in something more to my liking. Using the standard tag type names such as ASCII, SHORT, LONG, and RATIONAL.
Methods/Functions:
TagExtender() - This little gem is a callback function that allows you to actually keep your CUSTOM tags in the tiff. Without it ALL of your custom tags would disappear when you deleted any tag (even if you deleted just one).
DeleteTiffTags() - This is the main method that deletes a list of tags. Simply pass in a list of ushort tag numbers and all will be deleted. Keep in mind not using the TagExtender function will cause your custom tags to go poof!
DeleteTiffTag() - This is simply used to delete a single tiff tag. It calls upon DeleteTiffTags() to handle the grunt work.
public static bool DeleteTiffTags(string sFileName, List<ushort> ushortTagNumbers)
{
//Deletes a list of tiff tag from the given image
//Returns true if successful or false if error occured
//Define variables
List<TIFFTAGS_PAGE> ttPage = new List<TIFFTAGS_PAGE>();
//Check for empty list
if (ushortTagNumbers.Count == 0) return false;
try
{
//ADDED
m_lTagsToWrite = new List<TIFFTAGS_TAG>();
m_lTagsToWrite.Add(new TIFFTAGS_TAG("", 38001, Convert.ToString("")));
m_lTagsToWrite.Add(new TIFFTAGS_TAG("", 38002, Convert.ToString("")));
m_parentExtender = Tiff.SetTagExtender(TagExtender);
//Open the file for reading
using (Tiff input = Tiff.Open(sFileName, "r"))
{
if (input == null) return false;
//Get page count
int numberOfDirectories = input.NumberOfDirectories();
//Go through all the pages
for (short i = 0; i < numberOfDirectories; ++i)
{
//Set the page
input.SetDirectory(i);
//Create a new tags dictionary to store all my tags
Dictionary<ushort, FieldValue[]> dTags = new Dictionary<ushort, FieldValue[]>();
//Get all the tags for the page
for (ushort t = ushort.MinValue; t < ushort.MaxValue; ++t)
{
TiffTag tag = (TiffTag)t;
FieldValue[] tagValue = input.GetField(tag);
if (tagValue != null)
{
dTags.Add(t, tagValue);
}
}
//Check if the page is encoded
bool encoded = false;
FieldValue[] compressionTagValue = input.GetField(TiffTag.COMPRESSION);
if (compressionTagValue != null)
encoded = (compressionTagValue[0].ToInt() != (int)Compression.NONE);
//Create a new byte array to store all my image data
int numberOfStrips = input.NumberOfStrips();
byte[] byteImageData = new byte[numberOfStrips * input.StripSize()];
int offset = 0;
//Get all the image data for the page
for (int n = 0; n < numberOfStrips; ++n)
{
int bytesRead;
if (encoded)
bytesRead = input.ReadEncodedStrip(n, byteImageData, offset, byteImageData.Length - offset);
else
bytesRead = input.ReadRawStrip(n, byteImageData, offset, byteImageData.Length - offset);
//Add to the offset keeping up with where we are
offset += bytesRead;
}
//Save all the tags, image data, and height, etc for the page
TIFFTAGS_PAGE tiffPage = new TIFFTAGS_PAGE();
tiffPage.Height = input.GetField(TiffTag.IMAGELENGTH)[0].ToInt();
tiffPage.Tags = dTags;
tiffPage.PageData = byteImageData;
tiffPage.Encoded = encoded;
tiffPage.StripSize = input.StripSize();
tiffPage.StripOffset = input.GetField(TiffTag.STRIPOFFSETS)[0].ToIntArray()[0];
ttPage.Add(tiffPage);
}
}
//Open the file for writing
using (Tiff output = Tiff.Open(sFileName + "-new.tif", "w"))
{
if (output == null) return false;
//Go through all the pages
for (short i = 0; i < ttPage.Count(); ++i)
{
//Write all the tags for the page
foreach (KeyValuePair<ushort, FieldValue[]> tagValue in ttPage[i].Tags)
{
//Write all the tags except the one's needing to be deleted
if (!ushortTagNumbers.Contains(tagValue.Key))
{
TiffTag tag = (TiffTag)tagValue.Key;
output.GetTagMethods().SetField(output, tag, tagValue.Value);
}
}
//Set the height for the page
output.SetField(TiffTag.ROWSPERSTRIP, ttPage[i].Height);
//Set the offset for the page
output.SetField(TiffTag.STRIPOFFSETS, ttPage[i].StripOffset);
//Save page data along with tags
output.CheckpointDirectory();
//Write each strip one at a time using the same orginal strip size
int numberOfStrips = ttPage[i].PageData.Length / ttPage[i].StripSize;
int offset = 0;
for (int n = 0; n < numberOfStrips; ++n)
{
//Write all the image data (strips) for the page
if (ttPage[i].Encoded)
//output.WriteEncodedStrip(n, byteStrip, offset, byteStrip.Length - offset);
output.WriteEncodedStrip(0, ttPage[i].PageData, offset, ttPage[i].StripSize - offset);
else
output.WriteRawStrip(n, ttPage[i].PageData, offset, ttPage[i].StripSize - offset);
//Add to the offset keeping up with where we are
offset += ttPage[i].StripOffset;
}
//Save the image page
output.WriteDirectory();
}
}
//ADDED
Tiff.SetTagExtender(m_parentExtender);
}
catch
{
//ADDED
Tiff.SetTagExtender(m_parentExtender);
//Error occured
return false;
}
//Return success
return true;
}