Question to display of photoshop tag

[herb]

Hello Phil

I am working with ExifTool 12.47 on a Windows 10 system.

Looking for tag Photoshop:PrintStyle my application got confused because of the following behaviour:

This tag is defined twice:
- PrintStyle(1) has e.g. value "Centered"
  PrintStyle(2) contains unknown / not specified data

- command exiftool <opts> -a -photoshop:Printstyle <testfile>
  displays the following

Code Select Expand

exiftool <opts> -a -photoshop:Printstyle <testfile>
with opts: empty     --> only PrintStyle(1) is shown
           -u        --> PrintStyle(1) and PrintStyle(2) are shown
           -validate --> also both PrintStyle are displayed
Further tests showed that this behaviour exists for many of the photoshop tags.
I guess for all tags flagged as "unknown" in photoshop.pm file.

Why does this happen?
and can it be avoided, that -u and -validate display all unknown tags?
Should PrintStyle(2) be renamed?

Please look also at: https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=13716.msg74012#msg74012

Thanks for your help in advance
Best regards
herb

[Phil Harvey]

Can you provide a sample for testing?

Thanks.

- Phil

[herb]

Hello Phil,

thanks for looking into this.
Attached please find my testfile.

Best regards
herb

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Herb,

I see, yes.  The -validate option does validation of some pre-defined tags which are marked as Unknown.  So these extra tags are extracted when -validate is used.

The other topic you referenced concerns dynamically-generated Unknown tags (as opposed to pre-defined ones).  These tags shouldn't appear when just -validate is used.

- Phil

[herb]

Hello Phil,

thanks for the latest version of ExifTool.
In history I see:
 Prevent dynamically-generated Unknown tags from being extracted when the -validate option is used without -u
so I thought a correction is done.

But sorry to say: With 12.48 I do not see any change in behaviour.

Best regards
herb

[Phil Harvey]

This isn't a dynamically-generated tag.

Any pre-defined Unknown tag is still extracted with -validate.

The behaviour here hasn't changed.

- Phil