Exit Byte Order

[waltwooton]

ExifTool 8.56 appears to report the Exif Byte Order as Little-endian when it is Big-endian and vice-versa.

Walt Wooton

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Walt,

The only way I could see this happening is if there are multiple EXIF segments with different byte order and you are looking at the other one.  Email me a sample and I'll take a look (philharvey66 at gmail.com).

- Phil

[Phil Harvey]

Thanks for the samples.  I copy my email response to the forum:

The first image you sent is indeed big-endian.  The 2nd contains no EXIF.

I am sure that exiftool is reporting the byte order correctly.  You can see the bytes yourself with the -htmlDump output if you really want to get into the nitty-gritty.

The endianness of the computer system doesn't mean much when writing EXIF (many big-endian systems write little-endian EXIF and visa versa).  ExifTool for example creates big-endian by default unless you specify otherwise, independent of the system you are running.

   - Phil

The reason I think the Endianness is reversed is that our local photos, which only see PCs, report as Big-Endian, but AP photos, almost certainly edited on Macs, report as Little-Endian.