Patent ID: 7302118

Claim:
A method for transforming a digital image comprising a main image and metadata associated with the main image in accordance with a parameter, comprising: checking a compression tag contained in the metadata of the digital image, wherein the digital image is obtained from a file stored in the Exchangeable Image File (“EXIF”) format, to determine whether a thumbnail image contained in the metadata of the digital image is in a compressed JPEG format: (1) if the compression tag is set, encoding the digital image in a file having a specified format; and (2) if the compression tag is not set, converting the thumbnail image to the compressed JPEG format prior to encoding the digital image in the file having the specified format; transforming the main image of the digital image in accordance with the parameter to produce a transformed main image; modifying the metadata of the digital image in accordance with the parameter to produce updated metadata corresponding to the transformed main image; and storing the transformed main image and updated metadata together in the file having the specified format to complete encoding of the digital image.