Errors & Warnings for Maker Notes

[mikenaylor]

My images have been bounced between many applications over the years (incl. Lightroom, Photo Supreme, Bridge and Photoshop), so some unneeded metadata has accumulated on the way.  This is causing problems when trying out alternative DAM applications, so I ran the following command in an attempt to clean out some junk.

exiftool -r -overwrite_original_in_place -XMP-crs:all= -XMP-idimager:all= -XMP-ics:all= -XMP-xmpMM:all= -XMP-microsoft:all= LRIMAGES/

After several hours, this was the result.

1793 directories scanned
24275 image files updated
   59 files weren't updated due to errors

The 59 files were DNG and converted from JPG in 2005 from an Olympus E-20P.  Here's an example Error message:

Error: [minor] Bad MakerNotes offset for ThumbnailImage - LRIMAGES/2005/2005-12-03 Digital Art Five Flowers/PC202078.dng

Also all the DNG files from my new Lieca Q (Typ 116) camera produced a Warning messages like this:

Warning: [minor] Possibly incorrect maker notes offsets (fix by 44461654?) - LRIMAGES/2017/2017-10-17 Leica Q El Coto Walk/L1000008.dng

Your comments and recommendations will be most appreciated.

[Phil Harvey]

DNG files are a problem because Adobe applications think they can write this format, but they can't rewrite the maker notes properly.

You can try adding the -F option so exiftool attempts to fix the makernote offset problems, but this doesn't always work.  See FAQ 15 for help with this.

- Phil