Remove MakerNote and save 55K!

[Anders Hultman]

When I publish pictures on my web site I usually scale them down to 
500 pixels in width. The files typically become 20 to 60 kbytes each. 
When I started to publish pictures from my *istD i noticed that they 
were significantly larger, often in excess of 100 kbytes. After a 
while I found out that the reason for this is a special MakerNote 
section within the Exif data.

Now, I want to keep the ordinary Exif data fields, like aperture and 
shutter values and stuff, but keeping an extra 55,296 bytes (as it 
turned out to be) of metadata in the file just seem silly when the 
image itself may be smaller than that.

Pentax probably stores some of the more esoteric camera settings in 
the MakerNote, things that don't have a standardized place among the 
usual Exif fields, but since my web page visitors can't read them 
anyway I want to delete the MakerNote from the files -- and thus 
cutting download times in half.

So after some days of hacking, I now present my own MakerNote removal tool:
  http://anders.hultman.nu/data/makernote/
Enjoy!
anders
-------------------------
http://anders.hultman.nu/
med dagens bild och allt!