Exporting EXIF Not Viewable Everywhere

[klaxian]

When exporting a JPG from ASP, the EXIF information contained within it is not readable by some other applications. For example, Google+ and Picasa can't read it. JPGs straight from the camera and files exported from ASP and subsequently edited with GIMP do not have this problem. Is ASP perhaps saving EXIF data in a non-standard format? Can this be fixed? Thanks.

[afx]

You might want to check this in detail with exiftool -g0 -D.

cheers
afx

[klaxian]

Thanks. I'm on Linux so exiftool isn't an option for me (or I couldn't find a Linux version). I installed exifprobe though and I'll investigate further.

[afx]

Every Linux distro worth a penny has exiftool, check again

cheers
afx

[klaxian]

Found it. It's in the libimage-exiftool-perl package.

[klaxian]

Well there does seem to be quite a difference between EXIF information in a file saved from ASP and a JPG straight from the camera. At first glance, there is 3x as much data in the camera JPG. Why is ASP stripping so much from the EXIF when saving? I suspect that the applications that don't show data from ASP JPGs (ie. Google Picasa) are looking for meta tags that ASP leaves out.

Here are examples:
JPG exported from ASP: http://pastebin.com/wkRkWqiC
JPG straight from the camera: http://pastebin.com/jTPPWuUL

Any thoughts on how to get full EXIFs from ASP exports?

[thufor]

Look into "COPYING EXAMPLES" section of exiftool man.

[ferdinand-paris]

The simple answer is that camera makers put a lot of the metadata in an encoded form in the "EXIF maker notes", and these are not documented by any camera maker that I know of. So software writers have to work these out for themselves for each camera (and lens). Bibble 4 used to be able to output the maker notes for some Nikons, but that wasn't transferred across to Bibble 5 or Aftershot Pro. So the JPG from the camera will have the maker notes but the developed RAW won't. I suspect that ASP is not alone in this behaviour.

As another example of this issue, many of the Sony and Sigma lenses for my NEX-7 need lens corrections applied. I've worked out the (a,b,c) parameters for each of these lenses and put them into the Aftershot Pro lens DB. But ASP doesn't recognise the lens, presumably because it's encoded in the maker notes. So if I have an image taken at 30mm focal length, was this the Sigma 30mm, or the 18-55 set at 30mm? I need to know which lens was used in order to apply the right correction.

As noted, ExifTool is the answer. You can use it to copy the maker notes from the RAW to the JPG. As it's a command line program it's not easy to use. Windows users can use iMatch and a script I wrote to automate the process.

F_P

[Dutchmm]

Ferdinand

Did you write the iMatch script to which you refer because you couldn't find a decent scripting language on Windows?

I am trying to help Sebastian on the Facebook page to retain some of the GPS settings that (despite their being official EXIF tags) AS doesn't load from the original. I know how to script for this on Linux, but I haven't used Windows for some time now (and I'm not boasting).

It looks, on first examination, as though it would be possible to write a Powershell script to execute exiftool and manipulate the path variables necessary in order to re-connect the EXIF info from the raw to the output?

Regards

[ferdinand-paris]

Yes, I wrote the script, over many years. You can get it here. To run it you need iMatch, which is a DAM program. iMatch comes with WinWrap Basis, which is a flavour of VB basic, so that's what the script is run in.

IIRC you can run ExiTool batch jobs from the command line, if your files are named and located "correctly". So I think you can copy EXIF from all files in a folder named like DSCxxxx.NEF to files named DSCxxxx.JPG in the same folder. The script makes it easier and gives you more control, but you need iMatch.

F_P

[ferdinand-paris]

In this ExifTool documentation page:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exi ... l_pod.html

There is this copying example:

exiftool -tagsfromfile %d%f.CRW -r -ext JPG dir
- - -Recursively rewrite all JPG images in dir with information copied from the corresponding CRW images in the same directories.

You'd need to edit this command and specify just the tags you want copied, but it should work.

F_P

[klaxian]

Thanks. I am aware there are workarounds. However, this issue shouldn't exist in the first place. If I can copy the remaining EXIF data to any exported JPGs, ASP should be able to do the same thing without an additional step. I already have to edit my images because of the 1px edge line bugs. I am using ASP to streamline my workflow, not to add more steps to it. I hope the software is improved to address this.

[EOS]

However, this issue shouldn't exist in the first place. .

idd, this should be not exists
me have problems with the exif comment......

[grubernd]

Code: Select all

9: Exif Byte Order                 : Big-endian (Motorola, MM)

tell google+ / picasa they should check their libs and see if they can cope with Big Endian / Motorola encoding (previously known as mac-order)..

[klaxian]

I don't think the problem is Google not supporting Big-endian because a small amount of the EXIF data is displayed (ie. camera and model). I suspect they are looking for exposure, aperture, and others in tags that are not exported by ASP. These are found in exports from other applications like LightRoom and GIMP though.

The main problem is that ASP seems to strip lots of tags on export and the ones it saves are not the same as what some other (popular) applications expect.

The other thing I noticed is that this problem is much worse when dealing with RAW files than JPGs from the camera. Tons of EXIF tags are omitted or changed when exporting RAW to JPG, but exports after starting with a JPG carry though most if not all of the tags in a usable way.

Am I really crazy for thinking this is a problem?