PM+ 7269 can't display some metadata

[ibgb]

Just what you don't wanna hear.

I had been using the November version of PM +7239, adding Meta data, etc. Today I downloaded the newest version of PM +7269 and it appears that much of the meta-data which was added to the images by the PM+ 7239 could not be seen by the 7269 version.

Of course, I checked with the Exiftool, which could find the meta-data as it is there in the image, but for some reason, the 7269 version cannot see the metadata, and thus display the metadata contained within the image.

So I hope there might be one more version.

One idea that popped into my head was that the PM +7239 version had put the metadata in the wrong place or something, but because the exiftool can find the data within the image it seems that the PM +7239 version was doing that correctly, but the PM+ 7269 version needs a tweek.

This is with Apple M3, macos 15.3.2

Two images taken within a few seconds are uploaded. The one ending in 0556 does not display the metadata whereas the image ending in 0557 does seem to display things correctly.

[ibgb]

Also, I will note that the problem image does not display IPTC Data using Apple's Photos app or the Preview app, however, the exiftool can find it.

[dennis]

Please see this thread for more info...

https://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=16475.msg80714#msg80714

[ibgb]

I do believe, after looking at exiftool, the metadata can be updated by a command, like:

exiftool -tagsFromFile @  file.HEIC

see:  https://exiftool.org/exiftool_pod.html#Tag-operations

 However, some of the image files always displayed in macOS preview app as two thumbnails, whereas the original files, not ingested, always displayed as one thumbnail.

So I am not sure why this is but my solution to fix all these problems is to re-ingest the original files from the iPhone 16, as I have been keeping them around until things are stable. What I have been doing is the following:

1. Re-ingest the original images. This gives me two iPhone 16 images with one having a capital A appended.

2. With the metadata existing in the image file from a previous version (7239) of Photo mechanic, run the script, which will copy the metadata into the newly ingested image file and optionally rename it without the appended A.

3. This script preserves all the files by appending "_original" to the original files, and if everything looks OK, the original files can be deleted.

I would recommend using the latest production version of exiftool because they had some issues also with the iPhone 16 photos.

"IMPORTANT: Fixed issue which could corrupt HEIC images from newer iPhones under certain conditions when writing QuickTime:Rotation"

 https://exiftool.org  > History

[dennis]

Wow this is an interesting way to fix. I looked at doing a direct fix in PM but it got ugly. Being able to reingest and running the script could work. I suspect if you have both original and modified file in PM side-by-side, you could copy IPTC from one image and paste it into the other (using the updated version of PM!) and this would "do the right thing". But if you need this in a batch then I'm not sure if PM can pull this off other than a text export of desired IPTC fields (to create field/value pairs ala code replacements) then apply IPTC to newly ingested files from exported text code replacement file.

Unfortunately I'm neither familiar with sh or Exiftool's intricacies so I can't verify your solution actually works without trying it out and doing a lot of post-mortem analysis of the file and running PM in debug to see what happens.

If you start with a photo straight from camera that wasn't modified by, e.g., Photos which adds a second image and XMP that belongs to both images, then PM should do the right thing. This gets complicated.

Please check out my recent reply here.

https://forums.camerabits.com/index.php?topic=16745.msg81312#msg81312

--dennis
 

[ibgb]

What the script does is mostly in the part called main. It gets a list of the files ending in A.HEIC and then loops through that list. For each file name, it figures out what the original file name must be and then transfers, the meta-data and tags into the newer image file that ends in A.HEIC. Then you have a newly imported image file probably with the correct meta-data and the previously ingested image file under a trial or debug version. There is an option to rename these files so that the newly imported file has the same name as the original file and the original file has _original appended to its name.



To use it, you do something like this for unix/Macos:

change directory to some image files

cd some_test_image_dir

somePath_to_ScripFile/pmcorrections.sh  -rename

Probably best to create a test directory and add some image pairs: original file with meta-data from the trial version of PM+  and also the re-ingested image file using the latest production version. Then run the script for the files in this test directory.