Jan
02
2011

Losing EXIF Data

(Add / View Comments) (0)Sunday, January 2, 2011 - 10:35:35 pm
(Posted Under: Web Development, Photography)
Over the break in Warsaw, I started work on a new slide show feature for Photobox. It can already do a slideshow, but the code was developed a long time ago, and it's clunky at best. It's time for a new fancy one, using all sort of eye candy easily available through extjs. It's going quite well.

As part of that, I've redesigned the interface for viewing photo EXIF data, which I like a lot better. Which highlighted something to me - with this new camera, there is a lot more photo metadata that I care about, but am not seeing. Largely that was due to the limitations in the third party EXIF code I am using in Photobox, particularly when it comes to Nikon Maker tags. And as such, I've spent a good portion of the weekend writing a wrapper for that library, which fills in the gaps. At the moment, just the gaps I care about, like the detailed lens information. Thanks to using the exiftool perl code as a reference, I've been able to port over a lot of the functionality.

Sweet. But in doing so, I've discovered that a many of my photos are missing a whole heap of EXIF data. Seemingly randomly. And annoyingly, the lens information is part of what is missing.

Unfortunately I cannot find any pattern to what is lost. Ir seems fairly arbitrary, as some photos taken in the same set are okay, others are not. The obvious first thought was the software was destroying some of the information in the tags, however since I'm using the exact same work flow for both photos that are okay, and photos that aren't (transfer using Nikon Transfer, import, editing and export in Picture Project), I can't necessarily see how that would be true.

Thus far I'm at a loss, and have been unable to reproduce the problem with different camera settings, or different work flows, so I unfortunately don't know what not to do to avoid this. Similarly, I don't think it's a problem with my code, since exiftool is giving the same results.

I guess I need to put diagnosis of this problem on the back burner, but I'd really love to know what is causing it.

Not cool man, not cool at all.

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