Finding files with write errors (yellow triangles)

[jch2103]

Sometimes an ExifTool metadata write attempt will fail, resulting in a file marked with the famous yellow triangle. When one has a large group of files for which metadata is being written, an ExifTool message will report on the number of files written and the number of errors encountered.

If one is using Collections/Pending Metadata Write-back to update the files, any files with errors vanish from the collection, making it difficult to locate them to find/fix the metadata write problem.  If one has many files in the database, locating those 'yellow triangles' is tedious or difficult to do manually.

Is there something built in to IMatch to identify those files?

[JohnZeman]

The most common reason for those yellow triangles on my machine are excess ExifTool temp files left in the image folder.  Using Directory Opus (or whichever file manager is your choice) I simply locate and delete those temp files then after awhile the triangles go away (I think, maybe I have to writeback metadata).

[jch2103]

Thanks, John.

Unfortunately, there are other reasons also for ExifTool write errors. For example, I have a file that generates this error message: "Error: Bad format (0) for ExifIFD entry 6 - [filename].jpg" (caused, I suspect by some long-ago-used metadata editor).

Hence my interest in being able to locate the 'yellow triangle' files. (Even though I hope I don't have too many of these anymore.)

By the way, at least some of these files have a pending yellow pencil in the Media & Folders view, but don't show up in the Collections/Pending Metadata Write-back view.

[Mario]

You can use a Value Filter on the Extra:Error tag to find all files for which ExifTool returned an error message.