metadata extraction and manipulation

I am working on a large scale multimedia asset management system which handles numerous file types. Many of these files are created in apps and store metadata in the file, i.e. an image in photoshop may have a caption, copyright, name, etc. stored in its header. I want to be able to retrieve and manipulate this information from within our system. I know of the cfx_image custom tag that uses IML to do this with jpegs, but I am looking for something to work with multiple file formats, not just images. Or use a set of tags to access jpegs, pdfs, mpeg, etc.

Is coldfusion capable of accessing header info for different file types?

Does anyone know of any tags to do this?
Any small apps/utilities that can do this?

Thanks

This would be difficult to do because different file types store information in the header in different ways. It's not like you could just grab the header info for any file and read it, this is a file-type-specific action.

That said, I'm sure this is possible using the underlying Java API classes. You could create an inputStreamReader to get the file data as a byte array and then read through it to get at the header information. The trick would be coming up with different header parsing for each different file type that you want to handle.

So in short, no CF doesn't do this. I'd image there might be some custom Java classes or possibly CF components that do this, but they may well cost money. It's definitely possible using some of the Java API classes, but it would be a moderately complex undertaking.

Thanks for your help.

If anyone knows of any other tags or components
such as cfx_image that are built to work with any other file types please let me know

Did you have a look on MetaDataMiner Catalogue software with its XMP metadata extraction from Adobe documents and also for photos on Kalimages?