Amost any XMP data is also data that was added later, though some more modern cameras do save the regions recognized as faces in XMP. Anything that is in the IPTC IIM block is almost certainly data added at a later point, as I don't believe there is a camera that writes this data. Most of the data in the EXIF block is data from the camera that created the image, though there are a few others that do get added by other software, such as Artist and Copyright. EXIF is one type, IPTC IIM/Legacy is another, and then XMP (which includes IPTC Core/Ext). There are multiple standards when it comes to photo metadata. So it happens that sometimes the official one is the one that has photos with less metadata. *- This is important to me because - in the middle of the huge mess that are my photo libraries - I elected one folder to be the organised/official, which never gets anything deleted, and everything else is compared against it. I also didn't fix rotation in any of these pictures.

The only differences are in metadata, resolution and 'content' are the same. I've never used any photo editing tools on these photos. How can I make sure I'm not losing anything important?Īre these metadata really newer and generated by software or can I somehow irretrievably erase data? However, by the looks of their names and description, it seems that a lot of these metadata could only be generated by the camera they seem to be hardware-related:Īlso flipped information on Focal Plane X Resolution and on Pixel X Dimension too (X value on Y and Y on X). So it doesn't really matter which version I pick, since these can be re-generated*. This answer is very good, it says that new metadata were probably added by visualisation software like Picasa.

I'm using dupeGuru and it found many duplicates with different metadata. There's no easy way to know what's latest/more important. Thousands of folders organised in a different way, backups of backups of backups.

Exiftool metadata