Cannot find HP 635 Digital Camera frame number in EXIF

[Gary]

I've dumped the complete EXIF from a jpg taken on an HP 635 Digital Camera and cannot locate the frame number.
That said, Photo Mechanic can definitely find it, even when the filename is changed.
I've attached the EXIF dump for HPIM0216.jpg using the latest EXIFTOOL version.
Any ideas?

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Gary,

If you send me a couple of images with known frame numbers I'll take a look to see if ExifTool can extract this information.  My email is philharvey66 at gmail.com

- Phil

[Gary]

Phil;

Thanks for offering to have a look. I'm in the process of filing quite a bit of data and need to be careful when I see something odd. The result of ignoring it now could be a lot of work later.

Here is the photo for which I generated the report, plus one other.

[Phil Harvey]

Thanks for the samples.

I can't see where a frame number could be stored in these.  There are no maker notes and the only unknown information is a couple of APP3 segments which contain the same data in both of these files.  Use the -htmlDump option to see a binary dump of everything in the file.

- Phil

[Gary]

Interesting... I wonder where Photo Mechanic is getting the info to display?

[Gary]

I tried the online Jeffrey's Exif Viewer that is based on your tool and found this message that I didn't see in my dump.

"Warning   [minor] Unknown APP3 segment"

Is it possible that the Hp635 stashes some data in that unknown segment?

[Phil Harvey]

No.  The APP3 data is mostly binary 0x48 bytes, and is identical in the 2 images you posted, so this can't contain the frame number.

I even took a look at the embedded thumbnail images, which also contain APP3 segments, but these too are the same in both files.

- Phil

[Gary]

So sorry to bother you, Phil.

Based on your last post, I checked again. Photo Mechanic detects the HPIMxxxx.jpg format of the filename and extracts the xxxx portion as the frame number. If one changes the prefix or extension, it reports no frame number.

I didn't catch this earlier, because it seemed odd to go to the trouble to build that camera-specific feature into the software, when the frame number really isn't part of the actual image metadata and so can't really be used for much.

[Phil Harvey]

Some cameras record frame number and some don't.  There isn't much standardization of this information.

- Phil