The really irritating thing about this discovery is that WLPG has a track record of not dealing correctly with Exif metadata.
I’m now going back through my images, and as far as I can see, all those which are being reported by ExifTool as having problems with their Exif metadata are ones that have had GPS information inserted by WLPG 2011. That’s the case for all the images where I have explicitly added GPS information.īy the way, even though these two shots were taken at the same place, the GPS inserted (without my knowledge) by WLPG 2011 is wrong, and is located 500 metres distant. Notice that for this thumbnail, ExifTool is not reporting any errors or warnings. For these thumbnails, I explicitly inserted GPS information myself, in other words, WLPG 2011 has not had cause to write anything out to the files. Now here’s a screenshot of one of the other thumbnails that Geosetter is indicating have GPS information. But the interesting thing is that, for that particular image, I did not supply GPS data WLPG 2011 has inserted it by itself. That indicates that the image contains GPS information. You’ll notice that the thumbnail, and some of the others, have a dark blue marker pin in the top left corner. Click on the image to open it full sized in a new window. The screenshot is of Geosetter, and the highlighted image shows errors being reported by ExifTool (Geosetter uses ExifTool under the covers to do all the heavy lifting). Here’s a screenshot that shows an example of an image exhibiting both types of issue (warnings and corruption). In many cases, however, ExifTool is reporting that more serious damage has occurred and some of the data written into the original Exif section by the camera that took the image has been corrupted. This is a warning from ExifTool that another utility has written to the Exif section and damaged the structure in some way. Often it was a simple warning that the Makernotes in the Exif section have been damaged.
While trying to scrub my images clean of the false GPS data inserted by WLPG 2011, I noticed ExifTool was reporting that many of my images had problems with their Exif metadata. It also screws up the Exif section of the metadata in images. Meanwhile, I’ve become aware of another issue with WLPG 2011. I, and others, have reported this issue to Microsoft, and I understand that they are looking into ways of correcting it. The first problem I stumbled across was that if you are a photographer who uses IPTC metadata to record information about where your photos were taken, then WLPG 2011 will write false GPS data into your photos without telling you that it is doing so. Yes, I know that I’ve said before that Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 is a disaster, but more problems caused by using it just keep crawling out of the woodwork.
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