Module java.desktop

Class IIOMetadata

java.lang.Object
javax.imageio.metadata.IIOMetadata

public abstract class IIOMetadata extends Object
An abstract class to be extended by objects that represent metadata (non-image data) associated with images and streams. Plug-ins represent metadata using opaque, plug-in specific objects. These objects, however, provide the ability to access their internal information as a tree of IIOMetadataNode objects that support the XML DOM interfaces as well as additional interfaces for storing non-textual data and retrieving information about legal data values. The format of such trees is plug-in dependent, but plug-ins may choose to support a plug-in neutral format described below. A single plug-in may support multiple metadata formats, whose names maybe determined by calling getMetadataFormatNames. The plug-in may also support a single special format, referred to as the "native" format, which is designed to encode its metadata losslessly. This format will typically be designed specifically to work with a specific file format, so that images may be loaded and saved in the same format with no loss of metadata, but may be less useful for transferring metadata between an ImageReader and an ImageWriter for different image formats. To convert between two native formats as losslessly as the image file formats will allow, an ImageTranscoder object must be used.
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