I think you missed the point. First, we should have learned by now that using an unsafe language like C to read data from an untrusted source directly into memory is really stupid. Just look at the security vulnerabilities that have been found in applications like ImageMagick.

Second, the JPEG/EXIF format is just needlessly complex regardless of language. Instead of marking metadata locations using something sensible like delimiters it's essentially a whole file system within the file with directories and directory entries. The values of some directory entries aren't storied there directly but instead pointed to by a byte offset value. So if you want to insert another entry you have to recalculate all the offsets! Even using C it's easy to screw that up and corrupt the whole file.