On 12/05/2015 06:13 AM, Pedro Côrte-Real wrote: > EXIF is pretty standard and works fine. The problem is the raw files > themselves. There's no standard to them. Each manufacturer comes up > with their own specific way, usually based on TIFF but not always, to > store the information of the image, thumbnail and metadata.
I'm not going to argue with that in the generic, only the specific. *SOME* vendors have adequately defined their formats and publicised the same. that holds for my Fuji and Sony, I gather from Patric's comments it must hold for Nikon too but I can't say that from first hand experience and I'm not willing to make this assertion about any other vendor's format. We all know the FOSS vs proprietary debate and how some vendors think that by being closed they are doing what is best for their business. > We only partially understand how the formats work and what the fields > mean and most of them use absolute offsets to specify things in the > file (i.e., X bytes since the start of the file). If you edit a raw > file (or convert it to DNG) some of these fields can become broken. Call me a dinosaur but I remember when there were such things as "link editors" that were used with compilers to produce sing load modules by rearranging internal linkages in the files. Computer software has a good and long established history of doing things like this. I'm no longer a programmer, like Patric I'm officially (!) retired from such, but if this "you don't know how to rearrange linkages" were directed at me as a programmer who once produced many compilers and ancillary tools I'd find it a personal insult. While I'm sure some technological skills fall into disuse (Clay tablet, anyone? Mercury delay line storage?) I don't think that the current generation of programmers in this field are as incompetents as you are trying to make them out to be. Your assertions may be valid for the general case, as I say, I can only speak for a few formats that I'm familiar with and know to be documented in adequate detail, and I'm sure many are undocumented and for which your assertions hold. But I've carried out a simple test: I've taken those edited RAW files, put them back on a card, and put the card in the camera and viewed them there. One camera has primitive editing capabilities, not as sophisticated as DY ( :-) ) but enough to demonstrate that the formats are not corrupted. -- The only secure computer is one that's unplugged, locked in a safe, and buried 20 feet under the ground in a secret location... and I'm not even too sure about that one" -- Dennis Huges, FBI. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Go from Idea to Many App Stores Faster with Intel(R) XDK Give your users amazing mobile app experiences with Intel(R) XDK. Use one codebase in this all-in-one HTML5 development environment. Design, debug & build mobile apps & 2D/3D high-impact games for multiple OSs. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=254741911&iu=/4140 _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
