EXIF Application tag not writable?

[DPUK01]

Hello. I am trying to change the Application tag in a tif using the command "exiftool -Application=4.00 167.tif" but the following results is "Warning: Sorry, Application is not writable Nothing to do". Is it really not writable or am I doing something wrong?

[StarGeek]

What is the full name and group of the tag? Run this command (a variation of the command in FAQ #3) and post the exact output.
exiftool -G1 -a -s -Application file.tif

Looking through the Tags Names documentation, while there are a lot of tags that have "application" as part of the name, there are only a couple tags called only Application

There is XML:Application in MS Office files such as DocX. Obviously not applicable here.

The only other one is an MRC (Medical Research Council) tag. And that is a different file format than a TIFF. If you look on that page, you'll see that none of the MRC tags are writable by exiftool.

[DPUK01]

My apologies, Stargeek. I had wrongly assumed there was an "Application" tag as labelled by Adobe Bridge (see screenshot). I should have checked this by looking at the results of an exiftool query. Had I done so, I would have seen that the tag is called "Software" which I was able to successfully change the value of. I was also thrown by exiftool saying that the "Application" tag was not writable. Sorry for the confusion!

[StarGeek]

No worries. Programs like Bridge try to take some of the madness out of metadata by giving you simple names. But a name in Bridge might read multiple tags to fill that value.  For example, "Description" in Bridge might be reading the XMP:Description, IPTC:Caption-Abstract, or EXIF:ImageDescription tag.

[Phil Harvey]

My guess would be EXIF:Software for "Application".

- Phil

[DPUK01]

Thank you for understanding and yes, Phil, I see it is Software now. You help and suggestions appreciated