Hi ExifTool Forum,
Important Background of my issue: I've been working with senior iOS/iCloud support at Apple for the last 3 months trying to resolve an issue with my Photos Library (~ 17000 photos and 400 videos), whereby the photo library images/videos upload to iCloud, but will NOT download to a Windows machine (iCloud for Windows). After countless hours of troubleshooting with Apple, deleting photos, libraries, install/uninstall software etc. their position is that I have photos with potentially corrupted metadata in them, which in turn is causing corruption to carry over to my account in their iCloud servers. They are able to see corruption in my account on the server, but are not able to pin point which photo(s) are causing it.
Fast Forward to today, they had me export (drag/drop) all my photos from Photos.app (macOS) to a temp folder, and re-import it into a NEW photo library. I now have over 1500+ photos with bare minimum metadata left, and all dates are replaced in them with a recent Date Modified stamp. I've also lost all location info, tags etc. since it was a direct export vs. export with location, details. They specifically don't want me to File > export all metadata to avoid carrying over any corruption.
So after hours of searching the net for solutions, i came across ExifTool and this looks promising!
My Question - Is there a way to use ExifTool to run a scan across all my photos to validate their metadata for any corruption? I'm not even sure what "corruption" Apple thinks is in my Photos... special characters maybe?
Thanks much!