Unexpected behaviour copying makernotes

[herb]

Hello Phil,

I am working on an application that tries to manage tags also 'groupwise'.
Testing it I have seen the following:

I have e.g. 3 testimages, all with makernotes:
  T0.jpg image with Olympus makernotes
  T1.orf image also with Olympus makernotes and
  T2.nef image with Nikon makernotes
When I display all tags no warning or error is given. So for me everything is ok.


Test 1  -  copy only makernotes into a xmp sidecar file

Both with commands (where Tx.suffix is one of my testimages)
   exiftool -P -m -z -c "%d deg %.4f" -tagsfromfile "Tx.suffix" -Makernotes      Tx.xmp
   exiftool -P -m -z -c "%d deg %.4f" -tagsfromfile "Tx.suffix" -Makernotes:all Tx.xmp
I get always the response:
  0 image files updated  1 files weren't updated due to errors
  Error: Nothing to write
and of course no *.xmp file is created

As far as I know in xmp-standard there is no place for makernotes - so the behaviour of exiftool is ok.


Test 2  -  copy only makernotes into a MIE sidecar file

With command
   exiftool -P -m -z -c "%d deg %.4f" -tagsfromfile "Tx.suffix" -Makernotes:all  Tx.mie
I get the following response:
  for T0.jpg  -  I get the same error message as given for test 1
  for T1.orf and T2.nef  -  I get the message
     1 image file copied
     A *.mie is created. But this file is not properly generated.
     When I display its content I get the error message: unexpected end of file

With command
   exiftool -P -m -z -c "%d deg %.4f" -tagsfromfile "Tx.suffix" -Makernotes      Tx.mie
I get the following response:
  for T0.jpg and T1.orf  -  I get the message
     1 image file created
     A *.mie file is created which can be displayed properly.
  for T2.nef  -  I get the message
     1 image file copied 
     and also a corrupted *.mie is created.

Please have a look into this.
Thank you very much in advance.

By the way an additional question:
Is or should it be possible to copy the makernotes e.g. of a *.orf and a *.nef
into one MIE file ?
(Of course this does not make much sense, but from a technical point of view ...)

Best regards
Herb

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Herb,

Test2: The problem is that nothing is written (and a bug in ExifTool that I'll fix is creating an empty record in the MIE file).  Try this:

exiftool -P -m -z -c "%d deg %.4f" -tagsfromfile "Tx.suffix" -Makernotes -make -model  Tx.mie

You must copy the Make and Model tags or the MakerNotes won't be copied because these tags are used to identify the maker notes (and for this reason you can't have both olympus and nikon maker notes in the same file).  Also, the maker notes tags can't be created individually so they must be copied as a block as I have done.

- Phil

[herb]

Hello Phil,

thanks for the clarifications.
I tried your command and its works perfect.
Thanks also for the correction in advance.

Best Regards
Herb