Apache Tika uses the API : metadata-extractor to extract metadata from image files.
The most likely reason for the cause is if one has both tika and the metadata-extractor libraries in their classpath. The binary for metadata-extractor may have been built using a different version of XMPCore library compared with the one that Tika uses.
Solution: remove metadata-extractor's library from your classpath.
The issue with incompatible usage of XMPCore libraries by the two projects isn't resolved: https://code.google.com/p/metadata-extractor/issues/detail?id=55