This page is a work in progress, and will be used to explain some of the details about how ExifTool works.
When ExifTool reads or writes the value of a tag, there are 3 separate conversions applied to each value, resulting in 4 different levels for the value of each tag. By default, users interact only with the human-readable ("PrintConv") value, but other levels are exposed through various exiftool options:
-lang
option is used to specify the language for this conversion.-n
option is used, or for individual
tags by suffixing the tag name with a #
character.-v
option.-v3
option, or by using the -htmlDump
feature. Note that this value is
not related to the -b
(-binary
) option, which actually
returns the "ValueConv" value and is used for tags where this value can not be
presented in a simple text format.Below are some examples of these different values for a few tags:
Tag 3. PrintConv 2. ValueConv 1. Raw 0. Binary Orientation Horizontal (normal) 1 1 00 01GPSLatitude 45 deg 20' 11.00" 45.3363888888889 45 20 11
(45/1 20/1 11/1) 00 00 00 2d 00 00 00 01
00 00 00 14 00 00 00 01
00 00 00 0b 00 00 00 01ExposureTime 1/30 0.03333333333 0.03333333333
(1/30) 00 00 00 01 00 00 00 1eShutterSpeedValue 1/30 0.0333333334629176 4.90689059
(19868/4049) 00 00 4d 9c 00 00 0f d1