What does "Error: Directory Sony1 with 8704 entries considered invalid; not read." mean?
Added by Rowan Sylvester-Bradley over 10 years ago
I'm a beginner with Exiv2 so this may be an obvious question, but:
When I enter the command exiv2 -a-01:10:54 *.jpg
I get multiple times (probably once per JPG file) the message "Error: Directory Sony1 with 8704 entries considered invalid; not read.".
What does this mean?
Exiv2 does seem to have modified the created times as requested.
The camera is a Sony Cybershot DSC-W50, but I've no idea which directory it's referring to, or why it's trying to read it, or why it failed, nor whether this actually matters.
Thanks for your help - Rowan
Replies (3)
RE: What does "Error: Directory Sony1 with 8704 entries considered invalid; not read." mean? - Added by Andreas Huggel over 10 years ago
The warning means that Exiv2 came across a suspicious structure/value when parsing the binary Exif data and decided to abort processing this particular sub-directory. The reason may be that Exiv2 doesn't know the proprietary structure of the Sony1 Makernote well enough or that the Makernote has been corrupted (typically by another software used to process the image). Whatever it is, this particular issue doesn't affect the -a command in any way, you can safely ignore the warning here.
Andreas
RE: What does "Error: Directory Sony1 with 8704 entries considered invalid; not read." mean? - Added by Steve Wright about 10 years ago
Possible fix: delete the Exif.Photo.MakerNote tag in the file in question.(http://dev.exiv2.org/boards/3/topics/115)
And I've seen that error come up not only with pictures taken with Sonys but also those made by older Kodaks, etc.
Cheers. SW
RE: What does "Error: Directory Sony1 with 8704 entries considered invalid; not read." mean? - Added by Andreas Huggel about 10 years ago
In this context, the advise to delete tags should be taken with a grain of salt:
The original poster is just running
exiv2 -a-01:10:54 *.jpg
That command may issue warnings as mentioned, but it will only change the file in a "non-intrusive" manner, i.e., it will just overwrite the bytes which contain the timestamp(s) in the file, but it will not attempt to re-build the TIFF structure. So whether or not Exiv2 really understands all of the Makernote details of a particular image, this command leaves the structure as is, including portions it didn't read or couldn't parse, and won't corrupt anything.
Deleting a tag on the other hand requires Exiv2 to re-write the entire TIFF structure and Exiv2 will only write what it understands of a makernote in this case. The directory that it didn't read in the above example will not be written to the resulting image, which of course also has the effect that the warning will disappear.
Andreas