Most effective way of updated installed version of ExifTol?

[LateJunction]

I'm a basic user of Linux (no pun intended - who uses basic anyway ?) so I am assuming that the way to adopt each new update to Exiftool is to uninstall the current one and install the newer one, following the procedure on the ExifTool home page. Is this the most effective way of doing it?

That page offers excellent guidance, by the way, which I most appreciate.

[StarGeek]

I believe you can simply extract a newer version directly over the old version.

Under Windows, I use a short script which works like this

• Run exiftool -ver to get the current version number and save that into a variable
• Run wget to grab the current version from http://exiftool.org/ver.txt and compare
• If updated, wget the new version.  The URL is always the same depending upon what OS version you are downloading, with the addition of (dash)(version number) to the base filename.  For example, the current Windows version is https://exiftool.org/exiftool-12.33.zip, so the 12.33 part will change to the newer version's number.
• Extract the contents of the downloaded file overwriting the current file with 7Zip

[JimM]

I believe you can simply extract a newer version directly over the old version.

That's what you can do on the Mac also.

[LateJunction]

I believe you can simply extract a newer version directly over the old version.

Thanks; that seems straightforward enough.

[Phil Harvey]

I believe you can simply extract a newer version directly over the old version.

Yes.  If you installed ExifTool, just install the new version in the same way to replace the old version.

But you can run ExifTool without installing it, which allows you to maintain multiple versions on your system simultaneously and run whichever one you want.

- Phil