"EXIF APP1 segment too large error", questions about how to get around it

[reveille7a]

Hi all, I've been using ExifTool (both standalone and part of Geosetter) to geotag all of my photos that didn't already have one.  I have already gone through around 20k pictures from old point-and-shoot cameras and started to move on to some newer photos that didn't have a geotag.  That is when I got an error I hadn't seen before -- "EXIF APP1 segment too large".  Not every picture got this error, but about 1 in 100.

I noticed that someone had already asked a question about this a while ago and that can be seen here: https://exiftool.org/forum/index.php?topic=5103.0

It appears that my photos' EXIF APP1 was too large already just to add GPS coordinates and likely the culprit is very large thumbnail image binaries in the EXIF data, as some are greater than 62000 bytes and in the above post EXIF APP1 is capped at 65533.  Can I just get rid of this field or are there some bad consequences of that?  If I can't get rid of it, is there even a way to make it smaller?  And if that doesn't work, what is the best way to see how many bytes other fields take so I can remove whatever is needed to continue?

Thanks for the help!

[StarGeek]

What version of exiftool are you using?

I do recall some thumbnails can get very big, but they can get split across segments.  The reason I recall this is because in cases where the thumbnail is big, then Windows displays only half the image as a thumbnail.

You can removed the thumbnail image.  I've done so for the many images I've collected from across the web, though never with my own photos.  The only real downside is that some programs would normally read the thumbnail for a quick display now have to read much more of the file.

[reveille7a]

Oh!  It looks like I had two different versions of exiftool hanging out on my computer and my paths were using an older version.  I got the newest version (12.52) and replaced the paths and it appears to be saving correctly now.  Hopefully that has solved the issue completely.