Lens ID

[Archive]

[Originally posted by bronek on 2005-10-04 13:35:07-07]

Hi,
is there a possibility to owerwrite lens ID table?
I have Minolta 7D and the following lenses are wrongly recognized:

Minolta 70-210/4 macro is recognized as: SIGMA 70-210mm F4-5.6 APO
Sigma 300/4 APO Macro is recognized as: SIGMA 70-300mm F4-5.6
Tokina AT-X 28-70/2.8 is recognized as: TOKINA 19-35mm F3.5-4.5
Minolta 50/1.7 is not recognized: Unknown (25501)
The only one of my lenses that is correctly recognized is:
Minolta 24-50/4 that is recognized as: AF24-50mm F4

regards
bronek

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2005-10-04 16:06:13-07]

Thanks for this information.  I will add these lenses to the next release of ExifTool (which will be 5.65).

Unfortunately, the 3rd party lens manufacturers like Sigma tend to reuse lens ID numbers, so it is not always possible to uniquely identify a lens.  Except for the Unknown (25501) entry, all the lensID's you mentioned will be translated into strings like "this lens or that lens" .

It is users like you who contribute information such as this to keep ExifTool current.  But if you can't wait for the new version to come out or if you don't like the way ExifTool is translating strings you can always modify your own copy of lib/Image/ExifTool/Minolta.pm to overwrite or change any LensID that you want.  In general this solution isn't optimal because unless the changes get into the production version of ExifTool you have to re-do the changes every time you update ExifTool to a newer version.  ExifTool also has a mechanism to add user-defined tags, but currently they can't replace existing tags.  I will change this so that existing tags can be replaced with definitions in the ~/.ExifTool_config file, giving users another option with future versions of ExifTool.