Get raw EXIF string from parsed data

[janosrusiczki]

I have the following scenario:

• Upload an image file to my server
• Extract metadata (including EXIF)
• Extract some fields from the EXIF and save them to database columns
• Push the file to Amazon S3 for storage and serving and delete it from my server

The problem is that if I want to extract more fields from the EXIF at a later date I have to download my file back from S3 and pass it to this gem, which can be costly as I have many images.

What I would like to do is to get the raw EXIF string when first extracting the metadata and save it to my database and then use this gem to extract new fields by passing the string to it.