Will old config files eventually become incompatible with new Exiftool versions?

[ryerman]

Someone (ie. you) must have put the it there.  A sample user-defined file named "ExifTool_config" is included in the full ExifTool distribution, but to activate it you must manually rename it to ".ExifTool_config" and move it to your home directory.

It is possible that older versions of the sample config file are incompatible with the current ExifTool, which could have caused this problem if you had done this.

- Phil

Hi Phil.

This worries me!  I obtained a sample config file from the full distribution some time around version 7.60 and have modified it over the years for my own needs.  Do you mean that this file could be incompatible with ver 8.61 (my current)?  Or that it may become incompatible with some future version?  I use the stand-alone Windows executable which I sporadically update.  Should I also replace the config file with the sample contained in the full distribution and re-apply all my modifications?

Please say it ain't so!

Jim

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Jim,

It ain't so.

The only problem I can remember was a minor issue around version 8.44 when I added full support for structured XMP information.  This issue wouldn't occur unless you had user-defined XMP structures, and even then it would be easy to fix with a minor change to the config file.  Actually, tesing this out now with sample config files from a selection of versions back to 7.60, I can't find one that causes the problem mentioned in this thread.

The bottom line is that you shouldn't have any problems, but if you do they will be easy to fix.

You don't need to replace your config file when you update ExifTool.

- Phil

[ryerman]

...You don't need to replace your config file when you update ExifTool.

Thank-you Phil.  I was optimistic that would be your response because of your commitment to backwards compatibility.

Jim

[Phil Harvey]

Just to be thorough, I ran the problem command from the other thread against sample config files from all ExifTool distributions since the beginning of time, and none of them caused any problems.  I know there are some perturbations of structured XMP tags which may be problematic across the changes in version 8.44 (because I remember this from my testing), but it looks like none of the tags in the sample config file fall into in this category.

- Phil