How to disable the generation of the "original" files

[michaelpaige]

Hello,

I am trying to add a piece of IPTC metadata to some very large tif files.  It has taken most of the day and there is no prospect of it completing any time soon.

I assume this is because Exiftool is generating the "_original" backup files, which I think is a bit over cautious for adding a bit of metadata.  Is there a way to disable this?

Thanks.

[Phil Harvey]

Avoiding the _original file won't speed things up.

How big is the file?  ExifTool should be able to rewrite a TIFF file at close to the maximum speed of the hard disk.

If it is going really slowly, the likely cause is a shortage of memory.

What version of ExifTool are you using?  Older versions required more memory.

- Phil

[michaelpaige]

Thanks for your help.  I think I was able to improve the performance by using a server, the desktop I had was indeed a bit low on disc space.  The tiffs are about 300 mb each.  It seems to run now at about 50s per file.

Thanks again for your help.