When do I have to use :all ?

[herb]

Hello everybody, Hello Phil,

I read the help to ExifTool, the FAQ and others, but I did not get all details of the usage of "-group" and "-group:all".

I have an image file (from an Olympus camera) which only contains EXIF Metadata and Makernotes.
When I copy these metadata into a MIE file I get different resultfiles depending on the usage of "-all" or "-all:all".

exiftool -tagsfromfile image.jpg -all image.mie
  creates a MIE file that contains also MIE-metadata and also XMP-metadata
exiftool -tagsfromfile image.jpg -all:all image.mie
  creates a MIE file that contains only exif and makernotes metadata

This behavior is described in help file of ExifTool.
"-all:all" forces ExifTool to write the tags into the original taggroup of the destination file.

I also get different MIE resultfiles using "-exif" instead of "-all". This is also OK and clearly described.


Then I added some IPTC metadata to my imagefile and I tried to copy/extract the metadata without IPTC data.

exiftool -tagsfromfile image.jpg -all     --iptc image.mie
exiftool -tagsfromfile image.jpg -all:all --iptc image.mie
 both commands created MIE files that also contained the IPTC metadata.

exiftool -tagsfromfile image.jpg -all     --iptc:all image.mie
exiftool -tagsfromfile image.jpg -all:all --iptc:all image.mie
 both created MIE files without IPTC metadata.

Now it looks like that in order to exclude a group of metadata from beeing copied, I always have to use "--group:all".
Is this specific to IPTC or is it to be used in general?


And I have this question also for deleting metadata:

exiftool -IPTC= image.jpg
  did not delete the IPTC metadata. The response is: Sorry, IPTC is not writable.
exiftool -UPTC:all= image.jpg
  did delete the IPTC metadata group.

Do I also have to use "-group:all=" in general?

exiftool -all= --group:all image.jpg
  will only this command exclude "group" from beeing deleted?

Sorry but it is not clear to me what is the difference between "-group" and "-group:all" in case of
- excluding a group from beeing copied
- deleting a group and
- excluding a group from beeing deleted.

Thanks for your helpful comments in advance.
Herb

[Phil Harvey]

I'm on vacation an didn't read you whole post, but If you don't specify the group name (-all) then exiftool copies to the preferred group (regardless of the group of the original information).  If you do (-all:all) then exiftool writes to the original family 1 group.

- Phil