Delete MakerNotes on Windows or Mac

[RossTP]

I'm trying to delete makernotes on thousands of images. I've successfully managed to do this for minor errors using:

exiftool -r -makernotes:all= -overwrite_original -ext jpg .

However, thousands of images have a makernote warning (Bad ExifIFD offset), and when I try to delete the makernotes I get the following error:

Error: Bad ExifIFD offset for MakeNoteUnknown
0 image files updated
1 files weren't updated due to error

Is there any way to delete these makernotes? Or fix them in some way. Example image attached.

Thanks in advance!
Ross

[Hayo Baan]

Hi Ross, the sample image you uploaded was zero bytes so I couldn't test to see what can be done with it...

[RossTP]

Sorry about that. Not sure why that happened. Attaching again.

[Hayo Baan]

Got the file and played with it a bit. It does indeed contain quite a severe error, so severe, exiftool can not ignore it, even with the -m option (see also FAQ#15). The only solution I saw was to have exiftool attempt to completely rewrite the metadata (FAQ#20). This worked but did not include the faulty makernotes, but these you wanted to remove anyway, so that's no problem

The command to use here is: exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -unsafe -icc_profile FILE/DIR

Hope this helps,
Hayo

[RossTP]

Hi Hayo, thanks so much for this. It worked perfectly!