I've customized a bunch of tags and successfully written them to thousands of files of various types as indicated in my recent questions to this forum on other issues. This time, using a variation of exiftool -testtag=testvalue a.jpg to write a single value or exiftool -r -testtag=testvalue . to write the value to all files within a directory tree, I get an error. When I run the command above over a.JPG with progressive forms of -v I get this: Rewriting a.jpg...
Error = Error creating file: a.jpg_exiftool_tmp
Error: Error creating file: a.jpg_exiftool_tmp - a.jpg
0 image files updated
1 files weren't updated due to errors
I can't decipher this.
Anyone have a way to determine what the error really is? Because only by knowing what it is will I be able to figure out how to fix it.
Did you check to see if the file "a.jpg_exiftool_tmp" exists? That's the temp file created when exiftool is writing a new file. If it is interrupted for some reason while writing, the temp file might be left behind.
If it does exists, just delete it and retry your command.
I looked for a.jpg_exiftool_tmp file in the directory but do not see it. If the process of writing it was interrupted and left behind as you say, was it even created? Is there a way of creating or restoring it?
If you don't see it, then that's not the problem. And now that I think about it the error message for that is something like temp file already exists.
Only other things I can think of is if you have write permission for that directory, disk full, or some other disk problem.
Thanks, StarGeek. I attempted the same command over files I had previously successfully run it and got this error: Error: Error creating file: ./file.JPG_exiftool_tmp - ./file.JPGBasically the same as above. So I think you may be on to something but I just don't know what. It's puzzling.
StarGeek,
Your suggestion that the disk could be full was right on. I made some room and can now write tags.
Thank you.
Now I have a problem writing more than one custom tag at a time which I've described in another question on this forum. Any ideas?