Write UIImage along with metadata (EXIF, GPS, TIFF) in iPhone's Photo library

Question

I am developing a project, where the requirements are: - User will open the camera through the application - Upon capturing an Image, some data will be appended to the captu

Answer 1

Here is a slight variation of @matt answer.

The following code use only one CGImageDestination and more interesting allow to save in HEIC format on iOS11+.

Notice that the compression quality is added to the metadata before adding the image. 0.8 is roughly the compression quality of native camera save.

//img is the UIImage and metadata the metadata received from the picker
NSMutableDictionary *meta_plus = metadata.mutableCopy;
//with CGimage, one can set compression quality in metadata
meta_plus[(NSString *)kCGImageDestinationLossyCompressionQuality] = @(0.8);
NSMutableData *img_data = [NSMutableData new];
NSString *type;
if (@available(iOS 11.0, *)) type = AVFileTypeHEIC;
else type = @"public.jpeg";
CGImageDestinationRef dest = CGImageDestinationCreateWithData((__bridge CFMutableDataRef)img_data, (__bridge CFStringRef)type, 1, nil);
CGImageDestinationAddImage(dest, img.CGImage, (__bridge CFDictionaryRef)meta_plus);
CGImageDestinationFinalize(dest);
CFRelease(dest); //image is in img_data
//go for the PHLibrary change request