When can Little-Endian change to Big endian conundrum

[gaspodes]

Ok, so I've just starting to discover the Exif tool and I'm practicing on some old holiday photo's from 2013 I took with a Canon Powershot G15. Great camera for that time. But going through the exif data I noticed some pictures had the tag Little-Endian, some Big-Endian. Those with Big-Endian I had apparently viewed in Microsoft Photo Viewer at the time (don't remember it, but that's what I used in 2013/2014 and that's what the exif data says).

How is that possible? I don't think I have my head wrapped around the whole Big/Little Endian thing – I assumed all the canon photo's would be little-Endian, since that's what the Canon uses. Does anyone have an answer? It's not the end of the world, it just strikes me as odd.

[Phil Harvey]

Wow.  Changing endianness is a real bad thing, and can very easily corrupt EXIF metadata (the maker notes in particular).  I have seen Nikon utilities that do this, but I wasn't aware that Microsoft Photo Viewer could do this too.

Try to avoid using software that does this.

- Phil