Metadata file difference.

[raldo]

Can anyone point me to a way of diffing between two folders?

I'd like to verify the changes made by Picasa on files after saving converted WLPG data to files.

[Phil Harvey]

I do this:

exiftool -a -G1 DIR1 > t1.txt
exiftool -a -G1 DIR2 > t2.txt
diff t1.txt t2.txt

Mac/Linux have a "diff" utility built-in, and I'm sure you can find one for Windows.

- Phil

[raldo]

Thanks, Phil, that was what I was looking for!

[StarGeek]

So did you figure out if Picasa was changing other metadata?

I had heard that Picasa might corrupt some metadata in the past and there were a few times when I hit a wrong key and Picasa added stuff, but I couldn't quite figure out what it had changed even though the file size was significantly different.  I never took time to do some serious testing, though.

[raldo]

So did you figure out if Picasa was changing other metadata?

That's a good question. The major issue, AFAIK, is with makernotes. Does anyone know exactly what tags they are? Those are what Geoff Coupe blogged about some time back. I'm still trying to decode some of the diffs...

One issue I'm having is with how Exiftool outputs the text when the above commands are executed. Currently, the tags are moved around. Maybe that's because they're ordered like that in the file. An ordered list (region, then tags) would make this job easier.

[raldo]

I've added two attachments. They're ta dumps before and after picasa. (location and names changed)

It seems as if the [canon] section was bad before Picasa operated on the Image. But Picasa removed [Canon] altogether.

[Phil Harvey]

One issue I'm having is with how Exiftool outputs the text when the above commands are executed. Currently, the tags are moved around. Maybe that's because they're ordered like that in the file. An ordered list (region, then tags) would make this job easier.

Try adding the -sort option.

- Phil