Setting Orientation

[j]

Setting orientation as follows:


exiftool -orientation=1 file.jpg


actually sets orientation to 3.  I know that my example above is actually user error, that the correct command is:


exiftool -orientation=1 -n file.jpg


Somehow it would be nice if my first example either actually set orientation to 1, or threw an error or warning.

Thanks

[Phil Harvey]

Confusing, I agree.  But the advantage of the current system is that you can often save a lot of typing by only specifying a partial string to match one of the possible values.

In this case, I see being able to type -orientation=180 to be potentially useful.  -orientation=1 matches the same value but is confusing as you point out.  Matching whole words only would avoid the problem in this case, but would pose additional restrictions in other cases that could be inconvenient.

So I don't see any way that I can issue a warning here without making it less convenient for others.

- Phil

[j]

Hmm.  Now it makes perfect sense that -orientation=1 actually sets it to 3.  I never thought about 180.

Thanks for listening.  And thanks for exiftool.  Turns out that name-dropping exiftool is good for street cred.  Well, street cred amongst the fairly small set of people who care about metadata.  Admittedly not a set of people who spend a lot of time on the streets.  Usually.  Anyway, amongst that set, exiftool is like pulling up your tee-shirt to show your carrying.

Thanks again.

[Phil Harvey]

hehe

* Phil Harvey reaches behind his back and pulls out a huge mother exiftool-knife

P.S. Cool.  The old IRC "/me" syntax is valid in this forum.  (But to achieve the full geek effect, I would have preferred it wasn't changed from "/me".)

[pb]

Hmm...  In that case, how about the converse question:

It would be nice if exiftool -version did the same thing as exiftool -ver .

...Especially since in many other progams, -ver might be the same as -verbose .

--peter

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Peter,

Converse question?  Now I'm confused.

-ver is in homage to the perl -ver option.

Unfortunately -version won't work as a synonym because there are many existing tags already with that name.

- Phil

Edit: I just counted the number of unique ExifTool tag names:  Currently there are 5762, which does cause problems occasionally when trying to find names for exiftool options.