Yay.

And while fe50 fixed that small problem with "Auto CHDK to Exif", it's still bad and broken. Specifying
-e prevents exiftool from generating
Composite tags. But it shouldn't be writing them anyway!
"The values of the composite tags are Derived From the values of other tags. These are convenience tags which are calculated after all other information is extracted.". So they should
not actually be set directly, but especially when you are calling the master of tagging tools that auto-generates them for you? I like this "application" less and less. That means that since this utility has been around, it's been wrong? Niiiice.
Seriously, exiftool is baadazz. (as much as a tagging program can be baadazz anyway)
Regarding sidecar files, I'll give you one:
exiftool -ext jpg -ext dng -tagsfromfile @ -srcfile %d%f.mie -r .This will, from the starting directory, go though every image in every subdirectory with .jpg or .dng extension, and copy all the metadata to a same-named sidecar file in
MIE format. The command block-copies every tag into the MIE file, even tags exiftool doesn't currently understand, so as the software improves, you'll always have the original tagging regardless of the various edits and saved formats you go though.
Another variant of that command can strip out the .dng previews and .jpg thumbnails from the sidecar file as it creates it, while dng previews are only ~2M each, and jpg thumbnails even smaller, still it adds up for 100,000 images
(and you can always regenerate them.):
exiftool -ext jpg -ext dng -tagsfromfile @ --previewimage --thumbnailimage -srcfile %d%f.mie -r .One warning: you know exiftool is powerful. This is a great example for the possibly-pending wiki article. Be aware that rearranging the sequence of parameters has relevance; if you put the tag removals (the
--<tag>) in front of
-tagsfromfile @, the
@ is the token for referencing the file you're processing... what'll happen is you'll strip out all your thumbnails and previews from the actual images. Oops!
(and you can always regenerate them here, too.)Oh, and if you want to put it in a batch file, don't forget to double up the %'s....
%%d%%f.mie. I think. Try it. I rarely use Windows.