Best and easiest way to show metadata

[wywh]

Very often users ask why their images or movies have incorrect dates. Or if some data fails to display in some app. Usually it is impossible to answer that without knowledge of the detailed workflow and file data.

I guess a good exiftool command to initially sort that would be something like:

Code Select Expand

exiftool -a -G1 -s -api QuickTimeUTC=1 -api RequestAll=2 DIR
...but most users have a blank stare if that is suggested...

So: what is the best and easiest cross-platform means to get, copy and post that kind of info?

- Matti

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Matti,

There are online tools that will run ExifTool for you (eg. https://exif.tools).  I don't know any offhand that will allow you to use the arguments you specified, but it would be easy to create your own exiftool server.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

I pretty much spam the link to FAQ 3 all over sites like StackExchange and Reddit. I'm still trying to come up with the best copy/paste text to explain that metadata is an absolute mess and different apps will read different tags and call the result different things.

It also doesn't help that linux people love to PIPE->Grep for the results they think they want to see without realizing that they're filtering out the actual results they want.

Or they add the -m (-ignoreMinorErrors) option option and are not seeing the warning they actually need to see because of that.

Then there's the people who add the -v (-verbose) option and completely ignore the verbose text.

Yes, I do get very frustrated sometimes.  It's often like pulling teeth to get someone you're trying to help to run the command you've told them to run 3 times and list the entire output.

In the end, I just keep pointing to FAQ #3 and asking for the results.  Or end up ignoring them because they're ignoring me.

[wywh]

eg. https://exif.tools

That site is quite good and the user can just copy & paste the whole page elsewhere (an unformatted text option would be nice, though).

Some drawbacks:

- It rejects larger movies.

- It lacks an option to display duplicate actual tag names (-s), what groups they belong to (-G1), duplicate tags (-a) and 'QuickTime' tags with system timezone (-api QuickTimeUTC=1). So, for example:

It displays only 'Keys:GPSCoordinates' but ignores 'UserData:GPSCoordinates' and 'ItemList:GPSCoordinates' with different values.

-It somehow displays always the same wrong location in its maps view at least in my setup.

Maybe I start pestering the site's maintainer about this.

...hmm... maybe an option to paste a custom exiftool command.

- Matti

[StarGeek]

...hmm... maybe an option to paste a custom exiftool command.

That could be dangerous as you can execute Perl code within a command.  See Security Issues.