So you didn't have backups of the originals from before they were corrupted? I always recommend keeping copies of your original images if possible.

To rebuild the meta information for all files in a directory hierarchy, you could do this:

This command deletes all meta information then copies it back from the original file, rebuilding it in the process.

As usual I would recommend you keep backups. I have added the -overwrite_original option under this assumption. Otherwise you can take out this option and exiftool will do the backups for you.

If you get minor errors, you can use the -m option to ignore them. This may happen since you say the files are corrupted.

Also, if you get makernote offset errors, you may want to add a -F option to enable exiftool to attempt to fix the offsets.

If you want to send me a sample image (phil at owl.phy.queensu.ca), I can give a more informed answer.

- Phil

Thanks for the sample. The only questionable meta information I can see are some XMP tags which may cause problems for any application which reads the XMP. But exiftool can fix this. For your sample, there are a number of tags which exiftool doesn't write by default since they are protected, but when rebuilding the information, these should be included. Sometime I may provide an option to do this, but until then the protected tags have to be specified individually. So your complete command is like this:

exiftool -r -overwrite_original -all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -interopindex -interopversion -all:ycbcrpositioning -all:compressedbitsperpixel DIR

A bit lengthy, but it should do the job.

- Phil