Image-ExifTool - Re: Cannot fix makernotes offset

Posted on Tue Jul 22 20:10:09 2008 by exiftool in response to 8374 (See the whole thread of 13)
Re: Cannot fix makernotes offset
Wow, this is a new one for me. FSpot has deleted the makernotes but left in the makernote tag with a data length of zero. Since it is not uncommon for some cameras write a data length which is too small, exiftool allows the data to run outside the specified bounds. Unfortunately, for this image this results in exiftool reading complete garbage for the makernotes. This is actually exiftool's problem, and I will add a test to prevent this from happening. What FSpot really should have done was just remove the makernotes tag (since the data itself is already gone). You can do this with the following exiftool command:

exiftool -makernotes:all= FILE

This, apparently, is what Flickr did too.

So the bottom line is that FSpot deleted your makernote information, and there is no way to restore it unless you made backups of your original images. :(

- Phil
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