Recommended workflow for validating images and metadata after using ExifTool

[aperturemode]

I've been working through a fair number of images, JPG, TIF, RAW, etc, fixing and adjusting various things with exiftool It is an absolutely amazing piece of software.

But one thing that's been slowing me down is trying to determine an efficient way to verify everything still works with the images after changing the metadata.

Does anyone have any recommendations on what is an efficient but rigorous approach?

Up till now I've been dumping the exiftool output to a txt file before and after running exiftool to get a good idea of what's changed in the metadata. If everything looks as expected, I then compare the images before and after in Lightroom.

Is this too much? Certainly it's not feasable to check 100s and 1000s of images.

If exiftool throws no errors after running, is that enoughto trust everything is ok?

[Phil Harvey]

"Everything is OK" is not an attainable state in general, especially due to the inconsistency in how other software handles metadata.

ExifTool catches many metadata errors, but it doesn't catch everything.  For example, it doesn't catch conflicting entries in the metadata, and different software may prioritize different tags, leading to different results.  Cleaning up metadata in images of different types from various sources is a big task, and the best technique will depend on what software is being used to read the metadata.

What you are doing sounds reasonable, but be particularly careful with changing RAW files since some software may be very inflexible about changes to these.

- Phil

[aperturemode]

Thanks Phil, good to know I'm on the right track.