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GexifView - an Exif tool for the truly obsessed

Doug Kerr

Well-known member
Those who are interested in probing the deeper mysteries of such things as the innards of MakerNote Exif areas (Ken, that's probably not you, but who knows), GexifView, developed and published by Ger Vermeulen, is a valuable tool.

It is not intended for doing the kind of metadata management that ExifTool does, but is more of an investigative tool. It will let us actually look at the binary coding of data items (something we usually only see in other Exif viewers, if at all, for items the publisher doesn't know how to decode!).

GexifView is available here:

http://gvsoft.homedns.org/

There isn't much documentation,. so you have to do a lot of "discovery". One tip: to get the detailed views, you need to go to the Options dialog, expand it so you can see all of it, check "Advanced options" to make a number of choices visible, and check Debug Mode.

Having done that, when you open a file, there will be a longer than usual "load" time while GexifView tracks down all the nested pointers and stuff.

Here's another alert, an area in which Brother Vermeulen has, in my opinion, made a mis-step in notation.

Metadata areas in Exif files may be cast in either little-endian ("Intel" - curse you, Ted Hoff) or big-endian ("Motorola") form. A marker in the Exif header alerts the reading application as to which is involved (Canon EOS cameras use the little-endian form.)

When the actual coding is reported in hexadecimal form, the byes are given in actual file order. But the program shows the sequences as, for example, "0x02EF", a notation that should be reserved for hexadecimal numbers, not byte sequences. (For big-endian format, the two are the same, so this becomes a distinction without a difference.)

But in little-endian format, the byte sequence 02 EF (I've stated the bytes separately here for clarity) represents the number, expressed in hexadecimal (using the common programming convention), "0xEF02".

But in GexifView, that is shown as "0x02ef" (based on the byte sequence). It should be just shown as "02EF".
 
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