Photography Asked on April 5, 2021
I’m in photo-backup-deduplication hell. Thousands of folders organised in a different way, backups of backups of backups. There’s no easy way to know what’s latest/more important.
I’m using dupeGuru and it found many duplicates with different metadata. This answer is very good, it says that new metadata were probably added by visualisation software like Picasa. So it doesn’t really matter which version I pick, since these can be re-generated*.
However, by the looks of their names and description, it seems that a lot of these metadata could only be generated by the camera; they seem to be hardware-related:
Exif:
Exposure Mode: Auto exposure
Digital Zoom Ratio: 1
Custom Rendered: Normal process
Scene Capture Type: Standard
White Balance: Auto white balance
Also flipped information on Focal Plane X Resolution and on Pixel X Dimension too (X value on Y and Y on X).
TIFF:
Orientation: 6(Rotated 90o ACW)
Maybe they were added as default values?
How can I make sure I’m not losing anything important?
Are these metadata really newer and generated by software or can I somehow irretrievably erase data?
I’ve never used any photo editing tools on these photos. They are all JPG.
The only differences are in metadata, resolution and "content" are the same. I also didn’t fix rotation in any of these pictures.
*- This is important to me because – in the middle of the huge mess that are my photo libraries – I elected one folder to be the organised/official, which never gets anything deleted, and everything else is compared against it. So it happens that sometimes the official one is the one that has photos with less metadata.
There are multiple standards when it comes to photo metadata. EXIF is one type, IPTC IIM/Legacy is another, and then XMP (which includes IPTC Core/Ext).
Most of the data in the EXIF block is data from the camera that created the image, though there are a few others that do get added by other software, such as Artist and Copyright. Anything that is in the IPTC IIM block is almost certainly data added at a later point, as I don't believe there is a camera that writes this data. Amost any XMP data is also data that was added later, though some more modern cameras do save the regions recognized as faces in XMP.
The examples you list above are almost certainly all part of the EXIF block and data from the camera. Whether they are important to you is your decision. If you think there is some point where you will get really serious about knowing how your images were shot, then they should be saved. But unless they are RAW images of some type (CR2, NEF, ARW, DNG, etc), then the existence or removal of that data won't affect the image. Never remove EXIF data from a RAW image as that will probably permanently corrupt the image.
Additional blocks you might find would be the MakerNotes, which is basically more advanced EXIF data, specific to each individual camera type. Also there is the possibility of an ICC Profile, though that usually comes from editing an image. The ICC profile should not be removed as it will affect the colors of an image.
Answered by StarGeek on April 5, 2021
The way to avoid losing anything important is to keep everything.
Disk space is inexpensive.
Your goal is probably to find pictures more easily.
Multiple copies makes finding a particular picture easier.
The right approach is search. It is not a grand scheme of organized folders. Search is why you use Google.
Pick a photo manager and spend your time tagging. Nothing will be lost. All the time you spend tagging will make pictures easier to find.
Start tagging your new photos. Then they will be easier to find too.
It's ok to have pictures in a dozen different file organization schemes. Nobody will judge you.
Answered by Bob Macaroni McStevens on April 5, 2021
If you have never used photo editing software with the images the images are all camera generated jpegs(?) and there should not be any major difference in the metadata.
In that case the images with the minimum metadata should be the originals and there is nothing to really be concerned about.
Answered by Steven Kersting on April 5, 2021
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