HTML output

[ScannerBoy]

From reading the documentation and experimentation, I understand that the HTML output, without any -v modifiers, will 'compress/skip' parts of some sections of the hex dump. This 'compression' can be avoided to varying degrees by adding more -v modifiers. I also understand that these can be combined into shortened versions, such as -v4.

My aim is to be able to keep all of the metadata sections fully expanded, while allowing 'compression' of the image data sections.
Is there an 'official' option or -v count which would accomplish this?
It seemed that in one case I had to go to -v6 to get all metadata fully displayed, but it also seemed to me, that that meant a lot of lines of output related to the image data which were not really of any interest.

[Phil Harvey]

ExifTool doesn't really deal with image data, and as far as I know it shouldn't be displayed with the -v option.  Can you be more specific?  What file format, and what information are you trying to suppress?

- Phil

[ScannerBoy]

The image format I am working with is mainly jpg.
The reason for using the HTML output was to better understand the metadata structures and its interpretation by Exiftool.

Initially, before I knew of the -v option, I was often frustrated  because part of the metadata block was snipped and hidden in a bunch of
[snip xxxx lines ]
When I experimented with the -v option and for some files was able to get a complete listing of all data - mainly the metadata - of course it also meant that none of the uninteresting parts were snipped, making the output that much larger.
One day, I was wondering if there might be an option to show the 'interesting data' in full and only suppress the parts which were 'uninteresting'
When I could not locate any such option ..... ;-)

[Phil Harvey]

Ah right, the -htmldump output.  Yes, the entire file is dumped, and the -v option applies to all sections.  Unfortunately there is no finer granularity to allow some sections to be expanded more than others.

- Phil

[ScannerBoy]

Too bad, but at least I did not miss anything in the documentation.

Still, it would be a useful extension, since ET is not really concerned with the image data as such in any case, why expand any of it :-)