Meta data errors with ExifTool after Microsoft Photo Gallery rotation

[gmos01]

After rotating an image with Microsoft Photo Gallery, it adds metadata. After this many original fields disappear and in a "-r -csv" extra bogus output lines may be produced.

I'll mail a zip with the original, the rotated picture and the csv file produced on a directory with just the 2 .jpg files.

I used:

• Windows 7 Ultimate SP 1 64 bit to run ExifTool
• ExifTool 9.62 (Windows exec and Perl version on ActiveState Perl v5.16.3 give same result)
• Microsoft Photo Gallery 2012 build 16.4.3528.331
• C:\>perl Image-ExifTool-9.62\exiftool  -csv -r  "bug_folder" >out_bug.csv

[Phil Harvey]

I don't have to look at these.  It is well documented that Microsoft products cause corrupted metadata in images.  This is a long standing problem that Microsoft doesn't seem to care about:

"Vista 'Mangles' Metadata" - Feb. 2007

"Corrupt meta data after annotation sync" (Microsoft Expression Media) - May 2010

"That Makernotes corruption bug was acknowledged by Microsoft a year ago, but it is still there in the latest build of WLPG." - Dec. 2011

"WLPG Creates Bad Exif Metadata" - Feb. 2012

"One of the complaints I have had for a long while about Microsoft's Windows Photo Gallery (WPG) is that, in my experience, it corrupts the Makernotes metadata" - Oct. 2013

- Phil

[gmos01]

Thanks Phil, fortunately I have the originals on back-up.

Think there is a related bug in ExifTool though.

If I inspect a Microsoft-PG mangled .jpg file with exiftool -k,  I get mostly correct results with some warnings like: "Warning : [minor] Possibly incorrect maker notes offsets (fix by 3752?)".

However, if I use exiftool -csv -r, I get far less correct data, plus some extra lines of garbage in the output CSV file following the line for the faulty file. See the .csv I have e-mailed.

[Phil Harvey]

Yes, I saw this CSV file.  It looks fine to me.  There is a (corrupted) value containing funny characters including newlines, but it is properly quoted so it should be valid CSV.

- Phil

Edit:  Oh, wait.  You're saying you get less data.  I'll take a look again...

The only thing I can see that could be a problem is the CSV output contains null characters (binary zeros).  Why do you say you get "far less correct data"?  How are you viewing the CSV data?

[gmos01]

My Excel 2013 reads it as 4 lines.

Must be  the Microsoft .csv locale problem.  MS has decided a .csv file in Dutch should use semicolons as a field separator.
No override in Excel, you have to change the locale for the PC.  So in NL we split fields in Excel with tekst-2-columns afterwards. New line escapes won't work in this case.

Thnx, Gijs

[gmos01]

Checked the csv in notepad++.
Turned out the "missing" stuff was in one of the subsequent lines at the far end.

So its just CR or LF messing things up due to the locale problem.