Pentax K-30 Makernotes corruption

[Peter_B]

Hi, Phil,

have been a fan of Exiftool and related stuff for years.

I noticed recently that when extracting Makernotes from my K-30 DNG files, using ExiftoolGUI 5.15 over Exiftool (on Win 7 64-bit), that the results are 'corrupted' from about Lens Type onward. This includes the Makernotes 'Pentax Model ID' and (all) subsequent fields such as Internal Serial Number and Serial Number. This does not happen with Pentax K-R PEF files, by the way. I am not sure whether it is only the reporting of the metadata that is at fault, or the error lies in the metadata structure itself. Either way, it is a bit disconcerting.

My workflow involves developing to jpg using various tools such as Silkypix 3 or Lightroom 5, even Irfanview if I'm away from base. All of these drop the makernotes, as you no doubt know. I then use ExiftoolGUI to restore the Makernotes from the DNGs.

I ran some tests using your published code from an earlier post viz.
exiftool -P -m -z -c "%d deg %.4f" -tagsfromfile "Tx.suffix" -Makernotes -make -model Tx.mi
https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php/topic,4339.msg20645.html#msg20645
to generate MIE files using Exiftool versions 9.41 onward, and found that the difference in processing happened first in 9.44, if that is any help. The error has continued on from there!

I haven't submitted any sample output - I found that any K-30 DNG from the web (such as those on K-30 Review on Photographyblog.com) would suffice to show the problem.

Makernotes reported by ExiftoolGUI always show two entries for LensType, and in versions before 9.44 these entries are the same (I should note here that I edit pentax.pm to contain only my own lenses wherever there are multiple sequences of lenses in a given Lens type, but these tests were carried out with unaltered exiftool installs).  From 9.44 on, the first entry reports the correct lens, and the second changes to either refer to M42 or equivalent, or shows nothing.

Hope this is enough for you to run with - I have lots of examples if you need them, and would prefer to post on GoogleDrive sharing the folder with you, if you want to see any.

Cheers,
Peter

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Peter,

Thanks for pointing this out.  I can reproduce this problem and will look into it.

- Phil

Edit:  Yes.  I see where I needed to change the Pentax maker note handling in 9.44 because they changed the format in some newer models.  I'll have to see why this broke things when copying from a K-30 DNG, and fix it.  It is a real pain when manufacturers are inconsistent like this.

[Peter_B]

Thanks, Phil,

much appreciated!

Cheers,
  Peter

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Peter,

I've just released ExifTool 9.52, which should fix this problem.

Thanks again for the report.

- Phil

[Peter_B]

Thanks, Phil,

I'll be installing 9.52 asap!

Cheers,
  Peter