Summary properties of a file

[Michael A. Covington]

When you right-click on a file in Windows and choose Summary, Advanced, you
get a set of properties which (in the case of a digital camera photo) tell
you quite a bit about the picture.

In some cases these are EXIF properties of the image file. I know how to
read those (by loading the file as an image and looking at its property
set).

But in other cases it appears that Windows obtains them through drivers or
something.

Is there a general way for a C# program to obtain the same set of
information about a file that would be seen by the user right-clicking and
choosing Summary, Advanced?

[Mattias Sjögren]

Is there a general way for a C# program to obtain the same set of
information about a file that would be seen by the user right-clicking and
choosing Summary, Advanced?

The Structured storage COM APIs are used to read this information. For
files that (unlike Office files for example) don't carry the metadata
themselves, it's stored in an NTFS alternate data stream called
something like "\x5SummaryInformation" IIRC.
Mattias

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Mattias Sjögren [MVP] mattias @ mvps.org
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[Jason Newell]

Michael,

You can download Edanmo Morcillo's VB.NET implementation of Microsoft's
Structured Storage API at
http://www.mvps.org/emorcillo/en/code/grl/storage.shtml. It's not C#
but with a little effort, you can convert it. It also has a demo
program that's helps you view the storage structure. HTH

Jason
Michael A. Covington wrote:

When you right-click on a file in Windows and choose Summary, Advanced, you
get a set of properties which (in the case of a digital camera photo) tell
you quite a bit about the picture.

In some cases these are EXIF properties of the image file. I know how to
read those (by loading the file as an image and looking at its property
set).

But in other cases it appears that Windows obtains them through drivers or
something.

Is there a general way for a C# program to obtain the same set of
information about a file that would be seen by the user right-clicking and
choosing Summary, Advanced?