If you happen to use Apache Commons Imaging for me...

# random

[Stefan Oltmann]

If you happen to use Apache Commons Imaging for metadata reading & writing you should really consider switching to https://github.com/ashampoo/kim as Commons Imaging is ridiculously bad maintained!

By porting this framework to Kotlin (which is Kim) I fixed a lot of bugs along the way, which are years old and won’t be fixed.

To contribute back to the original project I opened a PR for a bug that corrupts EXIF on write. The maintainer demanded a test as a proof which I also provided. But he really doesn’t understand anything. 🙄

Looking at the commit history you see him only fixing style issues in the code while there are PRs for bugfixes open for many months and a lot of bug reports in the issue tracker no one cares about. 🤯

I believe the maintainer even doesn’t understand anything about the domain of the lib. It’s really ridiculous and sad. 😞

I’m angry with myself that I invested the time to craft a PR for the project, because I could have known it beforehand. Despite all the bugs they want to go to 1.0-M1 and I was thinking I want to help users of Commons Imaging. 🤷‍♂️

But now I think it’s time to just warn about this badly managed project. Don’t use it! ⚠️

Your alternatives are either Ashampoo Kim for Kotlin Multiplatform or metadata-extractor if you only need JVM and no write support. And of course there is always the great ExifTool by Phil Harvey.

Switch to one of these, but please stop using Apache Commons Imaging!

[Stefan Oltmann]

Yet alone how people put work into this project by creating patches that got a „someday“ label. Since some PRs are 10 years old I think this translates to „never“. Never saw something like that.

If there is no interest in maintaining a project anymore people should just archive it on GitHub.

https://github.com/apache/commons-imaging/pulls

[Stefan Oltmann]

Really, it’s so ridiculous…

First he said it’s okay to use a Unsplash licensed image after I was hesitant to add it.
Now it’s suddenly a problem.

https://github.com/apache/commons-imaging/pull/367#issuecomment-1965664900

[Marcin Wisniowski]

Surely you can use your own image, modified to have the necessary metadata? Why must it be the Unsplash image? The issue concerns only metadata, the actual image data doesn’t matter, or does it?

[Stefan Oltmann]

Yes, but I have no image that shows this behaviour.

[Stefan Oltmann]

No image that I own.

[Marcin Wisniowski]

I know nothing of the problem domain, but can’t you copy the metadata to a 1x1 white image? Maybe you can’t and I’m missing the point 😄

[Stefan Oltmann]

Yes, that may be possible. But I don't know if that's not too violating a license.

[Stefan Oltmann]

The best way would be to fully understand what causes this problem and craft a algorithm that produces metadata like that. But on the other hand having images available that have this already is easier.

[Stefan Oltmann]

I can't help Apache here. I tried, but I gave up. 🤷‍♂️