I am trying to extract the "date taken" metadata from a Nikon RAW file (.nef) **without **converting it to an image file (.png, .jpg, .webp, .etc.). I can hover a mouse over a raw file and windows pops up an info box with the required data, so it must be there in some format, and I would think it should be accessible without adding a 3rd party codec or library.
Virtually every "solution" to the problem is retrieving the date taken from an image file like a jpg using propertyitems. this is NOT what I need. I need to extract from the raw .nef file. I haven't yet found a solution. Th closes I got was finding a file specification for the .nef file, but I can't seem to translate into anything that works. Here is a link to that spec. https://exiftool.org/TagNames/Nikon.html
It appears to me that this Stack overflow answer to a similar question might help: https://stackoverflow.com/a/34577019/5652258
Specifically, Drew Noakes writes:
I've recently ported my Java metadata-extractor library to .NET. It's been active since 2002 and had heavy testing through widespread use. In my tests, it churns through 2GB of images, extracting all metadata within in around 4 seconds on my machine. You could optimise further by telling it to only read specific types of metadata, such as Exif. It supports many image/video formats, and many metadata types.