Issue with reading Tiff image metadata with imageIO

Question

I'm writing a program that is supposed to taking in a bunch of tiff's and put them together. I got it to work for most of the image files I read in but a large batch of them throw out an error when I try to read them in.

Here is a snippet of code I have:

int numPages = 0;           
inStream = ImageIO.createImageInputStream(imageFile);
reader.setInput(inStream);

while(true){
    bufferedImages.add(reader.readAll(numPages, reader.getDefaultReadParam()));
    numPages++;
}

Yes I catch the out of bounds exception so we don't have to worry about that. My problem is that I get the following error:

javax.imageio.IIOException: I/O error reading image metadata! at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReader.readMetadata(TIFFImageReader.java:340) at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReader.seekToImage(TIFFImageReader.java:310) at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReader.prepareRead(TIFFImageReader.java:971) at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReader.read(TIFFImageReader.java:1153) at javax.imageio.ImageReader.readAll(ImageReader.java:1067) at sel.image.appender.ImageAppender.mergeImages(ImageAppender.java:59) at sel.imagenow.processor.AetnaLTCProcessor.processBatch(AetnaLTCProcessor.java:287) at sel.imagenow.processor.AetnaLTCProcessor.processImpl(AetnaLTCProcessor.java:81) at sel.processor.AbstractImageNowProcessor.process(AbstractImageNowProcessor.java:49) at sel.RunConverter.main(RunConverter.java:37)

Caused by: java.io.EOFException at javax.imageio.stream.ImageInputStreamImpl.readShort(ImageInputStreamImpl.java:229) at javax.imageio.stream.ImageInputStreamImpl.readUnsignedShort(ImageInputStreamImpl.java:242) at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFIFD.initialize(TIFFIFD.java:194) at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageMetadata.initializeFromStream(TIFFImageMetadata.java:110) at com.sun.media.imageioimpl.plugins.tiff.TIFFImageReader.readMetadata(TIFFImageReader.java:336) ... 9 more

I did make sure to add in the right JAI lib and my reader is using the "TIFF" type so the reader (and writer) is correct but for some reason the metadata is wrong. Now I can open and view all these images normally in windows so they really aren't corrupted or anything. Java just doesn't want to read them in right. Since I'm just using the stream meatadata to write them out later I don't care that much about the metadata I just need it to read in the file to the list so I can append it. I did find a writer.replaceImageMetaData method on the writer but the TIFFwriter version of IOWriter doens't have code for it. I'm stuck, anyone anything? Is there maybe a way to read in parts of the metadata to see what is wrong and fix it?

Answer 1

For anyone that would like to know I ended up fixing my own issue. It seems the the image metadata was a bit screwed up. Since I was just doing a plain merge and since I knew each image was one page I was able to use a buffered image to read in the picture then make it a IIOImage with null metadata. I used the stream metadata (which worked) to merge the images. Here is my complete method I use to merge a list of images:

public static File mergeImages(List<File> files, String argID, String fileType, String compressionType) throws Exception{

    //find the temp location of the image
    String location = ConfigManager.getInstance().getTempFileDirectory();
    logger_.debug("image file type [" + fileType + "]");
    ImageReader reader = ImageIO.getImageReadersByFormatName(fileType).next();
    ImageWriter writer = ImageIO.getImageWritersByFormatName(fileType).next();
    //set up the new image name
    String filePath = location + "\\" + argID +"." + fileType;
    //keeps track of the images we copied from
    StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder();
    List<IIOImage> bufferedImages = new ArrayList<IIOImage>();
    IIOMetadata metaData = null;
    for (File imageFile:files) {

        //get the name for logging later
        builder.append(imageFile.getCanonicalPath()).append("\n");
        if (metaData == null){
            reader.setInput(ImageIO.createImageInputStream(imageFile));
            metaData = reader.getStreamMetadata();

        }

        BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(imageFile);
        bufferedImages.add(new IIOImage(image, null, null));
    }


    ImageWriteParam params = writer.getDefaultWriteParam();
    if (compressionType != null){
        params.setCompressionMode(ImageWriteParam.MODE_EXPLICIT);
        params.setCompressionType(compressionType);
    }

    ImageOutputStream outStream = null;

    try{
        outStream = ImageIO.createImageOutputStream(new File(filePath));
        int numPages = 0;
        writer.setOutput(outStream);
        for(IIOImage image:bufferedImages){
            if (numPages == 0){
                writer.write(metaData, image, params);
            }
            else{
                writer.writeInsert(numPages, image, params);
            }
            numPages++;
        }
    }
    finally{
        if (outStream != null){
            outStream.close();
        }

    }

    //set up the file for us to use later
    File mergedFile = new File(filePath);

    logger_.info("Merged image into [" + filePath + "]");
    logger_.debug("Merged images [\n" + builder.toString() + "] into --> " + filePath);

    return mergedFile;

}

I hope this help someone else because I know there isn't much on this issue that I could find.