Is there an easy way to determine if an IPTC block comes before or after an XMP block?
I'm doing some testing on how Picasa reads metadata and figured out that at least one piece of data will be populated by the block that comes last in the file. And this has me worrying about all the data from other programs I've tested.
While I can just use the full output, which according to -sort, will be the order extracted from the file, this becomes difficult with my test file that has over a thousand tags filled. And specifying individual tags outputs in the command line order.
If not, no worries, I can create a couple more files with limited tags to test with.
You can see the original order of the tags in the file in two ways:
1. This is a bit tricky, but you can disable the default application sorting and enable the API sorting by order in the file:
exiftool --sort -api sort=file -G FILE
2. Using the verbose option:
exiftool -v FILE
But in both cases you must scan through the output to see if the IPTC comes before the XMP.
- Phil