Looking for 2nd opinion about deleting my MakerNotes on scanned images

[Bob_K]

Scope of this topic pertains to ~ 14,000 jpg files originating from a Kodak Scanza film scanner.

Every one of those throws errors in ExifTool such as:
    Warning: [minor] Unrecognized MakerNotes
    Warning: [minor] Maker notes could not be parsed
    Warning: [minor] (Something similar to the effect of may be corrupt)

Doesn't seem to hurt anything, but it's an irritant to watch 100s of those scrolling by as I'm doing subsequent ExifTool processing on them.

After referring to FAQ 8, I'm contemplating deleting all those maker notes on the theory that there's nothing of any practical value to me in them. (What possible current relevance could MakerNotes by the scanner be?") But I'm leary of doing that without any comprehension of what's actually in them.

Thinking that a quick "look see" by experts could determine the gist of what's there to guide my decision.

Attached files are:
1. TXT file of ExifTool Exif & XMP output (Apparently there's no XMP)
2. TXT file of ExifTool -MakerNotes -b output
3. JPG source file

[Bob_K]

Looks like my TXT files didn't get uploaded. Probably don't need them anyway as better source is the original JPG.

Of a secondary nature - I've changed the Make and Model information on all the file copies in my "working" set to reflect the particular film cameras that they were taken with. Could - but wouldn't welcome - reverting to the original scanner data if that was needed to parse MakerNotes.

[Phil Harvey]

The maker notes in this JPG file are 32 kB of binary zeros.  Nothing even potentially useful.  Just a waste of disk space.

- Phil

[StarGeek]

I've changed the Make and Model information on all the file copies in my "working" set to reflect the particular film cameras that they were taken with. Could - but wouldn't welcome - reverting to the original scanner data if that was needed to parse MakerNotes.

This is probably why the MakerNotes can't be read.  Try running exiftool on an unedited  file and see if you can read the MakerNotes.  If it works, you can then make a more educated decision about if they're important enough or can be deleted.

You can always suppress the warnings with the -m (-ignoreMinorErrors) option.

As long as the resulting images aren't a RAW file type and are just jpgs, then there's probably nothing wrong with deleting them.  Scanners like this are usually just a small digital camera in a box, not a scanner in the classic sense.  Which is where the MakerNotes are probably coming from.

[Bob_K]

To clarify, the attached jpg is original as output by the scanner, hence the make: "ADI" & model: "FSII-20MC" information is as good as it gets.
And yes, essentially a camera in a box. I wouldn't expect anyone would make a parser specific to that.

But no matter. Based on Phil's hard data I'm going to delete the makernotes in exchange for the satisfaction that I've done a little house cleaning today. 

Thanks for your help!