Makernote Problem with idImager and ExifTool

[Archive]

[Originally posted by copperleaf on 2006-11-16 00:53:02-08]

Hi Phil,

I'm using a tool called idImager for managing my photos. I've ran into a problem where when I go through the idImager download routines, the makernotes are somehow changing and I find that exiftool has trouble reading them.

Here is a link to a image before I download it:


http://www.copperleaf.org/exifproblem/dsc_5095_before.jpg

and here is a link to the same image after I download:


http://www.copperleaf.org/exifproblem/dsc_5095_after.jpg

Hert, the author of idImager says "IDimager just streams the makernotes that it read back to the file without altering it."

Here is a a link to the thread discussing this on the idImager forum:


http://www.idimager.nl/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1773&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Any thoughts?

TIA, Bill

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2006-11-16 01:20:45-08]

Without having a look at the image (I will have to wait until tomorrow
when I am on a higher bandwidth connection to do that), I can say
that just blindly copying the maker notes will in general corrupt them.
See my rant about TIFF inadequacies on
this
page for a couple of reasons.

But it is even worse than this.  Information referenced from the makernotes
block may actually reside outside the makernotes block itself (off the top
of my head, I believe Olympus is the worst offender here), so that
information is permanently lost if only the makernotes block is copied.

Adobe makes this same mistake when it attempts to preserve the makernotes
when converting RAW to DNG images.

I can give you more details on specifically what happened here after I take
a look at your image.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2006-11-16 12:59:53-08]

Wow.  This is absolutely fantastic.  IDimager is definitely not just
copying the maker notes without modifying them.  In fact, it is
modifying them more than any other application I have ever seen!

This is the scary part: it is actually attempting to change the byte
ordering of the makernotes data!  (what balls!)  This is an extremely
scary thing to do, and will most certainly render the maker notes corrupt
for any other application (this would be true even if it swapped the
byte order correctly, which it is most definitely not doing).

In fact, it isn't even getting the standard EXIF fields correct in this
byte swapping, and has incorrectly swapped ExifVersion,
ComponentsConfiguration, FlashpixVersion and CFAPattern.

As well, UserComment is written with an in correct format type
(ASCII instead of UNDEFINED).

So to sum things up: IDimager is making a complete mess of the
EXIF information.

- Phil