Lens Data is Incorrect

bulldog50

About a year ago, all of my photos uploaded to Smugmug taken with my Tamron 24-70 mm G2 lens were being incorrectly changed and displayed as having been taken with a Sigma 150-600 mm lens. Lightroom CC Classic is displaying the correct lens data, but when it uploads to Smugmug, the lens data is changed. Only this lens has the issue. This was reported as a bug, and supposedly fixed by Smugmug about 1 year ago. Now the problem is reoccurring. Smugmug had previously said there was a problem with their (Smugmug's) Exif reader. Is it asking too much to get this problem fixed, once and for all? Tech support has stated this bug is being triagged (code word for "We'll get to it when we can".) Last time I waited 3 months to get this resolved, and now the problem is back, AGAIN. Here is an example : https://jeffreybank.smugmug.com/Travel/Glacier-Banff-and-Jasper-National-Parks/i-KGwnQ7M/A

leftquark

The Heroes did exactly as they're trained and asked the Product team to look at the issue after you wrote in. We have a rigorous process for evaluating issues and prioritizing them and spamming us on every platform is not going to cause us to deviate from our process. Like any piece of software, there will always be bugs that exist and we must prioritize the most impactful bugs with all the other product improvements that we're working on. Every issue, when reported, is evaluated, an investigation performed, and a path forward determined.

In some cases, like in this one, we must work with third party providers to fix the issues and the most we can do is politely lean on them to fix it sooner. SmugMug uses a tool called "ExifTool", which is an industry leader in reading the metadata from files. When the tool reports the wrong lens information the most we can do is 1) check that we're using the most up-to-date version of the tool, or 2) reach out to their developers to implement a fix.

This was a bug in the ExifTool, for example, here's an output of what it's telling us. The "Composite" information is the tools summary of the metadata, which is what is most commonly used to identify the lens information (and what we use, since EXIF, XMP, IPTC, etc can often have conflicting data). We'll work with ExifTool to make sure this is fixed, but cannot offer a date as to when that will happen.

leftquark

P.S: As a landscape photographer myself, and a lover of Banff, I'm super jealous of the light you got at Peyto lake. That photo is magnificent!

smforumuserid

I'm also having a problem with lens information. I'd like to confirm that it's a bug in the ExifTool. It's interesting because one of the two lenses is an older and popular Nikon. Here's what I'm seeing for photos taken with this lens, the AF-S DX NIKKOR 18–140mm f/3.5–5.6G ED VR: Unknown (-6899464652149966066) 18-140mm.

And a fairly new Tamron: Unknown (-3727739588634878130) 100-400mm.

I'm a new forum member so please let me know if I should start another discussion for this. Thanks.

bulldog50

Well, the problem was fixed once before so it should be brought to the attention of EXIF tool immediately. Perhaps, considering your company is rather large, your developers work on their own version of Exif tool. This cannot be too difficult for an experienced team of photography developers. I will also contact exif tool, although I think it is free ware and open source and would not expect any kind of quick reply. You should not be using freeware on your proprietary platform. It cheapens your product. As you can see it is unreliable. I just downloaded it, and once I find out how to use it I will see if that is really the problem.

smforumuserid

Please note that I've been in touch with SmugMug support and have provided them with a problem image and screenshots of other applications that display the information correctly. So they are aware of my particular issue and will hopefully look into it as time permits.

bulldog50

As far as spamming goes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. It took almost a year to fix the previous problem, which is way too long. I pay my hard earned money for your product, and I don't like the excuse that it is someone else's problem. I would be happy to discuss this with your COO or CEO anytime. I bet they would agree with me.

leftquark

You're on here with our Director of Product and he agrees with you, that it should be fixed. I was just trying to be honest with you and let you know how things work so that we don't set false expectations. While we'd love to build everything in house, that also means that we'd never actually get to improve the product (we'd spend our entire time supporting all the various pieces). When we found the issues with the EXIF information we immediately reached out to the ExifTool team to push them to fix the bug. But that also means we have to wait on them to fix it, and they have their own priorities which we can't set no matter how hard we push. We could look at using a different tool but the other tools are no where near as strong as the tool we're using (which happens to be an industry standard).

bulldog50

I got in touch with Phil Harvey (phil@owl.phy.queensu.ca) of Exif Tool (see below). I told him the problem and forwarded your comments to him as well as a copy of the screen shot Aaron (leftquark) sent me, so he should be aware of the issue. Have you heard from him?

You have just been sent a personal message by Phil Harvey on ExifTool Forum.

IMPORTANT: Remember, this is just a notification. Please do not reply to this email.

The message they sent you was:

Can you send me a sample image? (phil at owl.phy.queensu.ca)

• Phil

Reply to this Personal Message here: http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/exiftool/forum/index.php?action=pm;sa=send;f=inbox;pmsg=1417;quote;u=1

leftquark

As I mentioned, we've already been working on this issue. We have a fix going through QA that fixes the issue, as you can see on our test platform: