Malformed EXIF text

Cameras and metadata editors sometimes store EXIF text as MacRoman or Windows-1252 instead of UTF-8. Damaged maker notes can also expose binary data as City, Country, Location, or Title.

PhotoStructure:

• ignores collision-prone maker-note fields by default;
• cuts a tag path at its first malformed segment, so descendants are never promoted;
• uses a valid country code when the free-text country is corrupt; and
• prefers clean title or description fields, but keeps readable damaged prose when ExifTool reports the corresponding malformed bytes.

Legacy text is recovered from evidence in this order:

1. CRLF in the affected bytes selects windows-1252.
2. Otherwise, a bare carriage return selects macintosh.
3. A matching exifCharsetByCamera rule is the fallback.

The byte evidence wins because another application may have rewritten the metadata after the camera created the file.

Configure a camera charset

exifCharsetByCamera is a library setting. Keys match Make/Model, then Make, case-insensitively:

exifCharsetByCamera = { "KODAK/DCS Pro 14nx" = "macintosh" }

The environment-variable form is JSON:

PS_EXIF_CHARSET_BY_CAMERA='{"KODAK/DCS Pro 14nx":"macintosh"}'

Configure excluded EXIF fields

PhotoStructure excludes these unsafe or collision-prone fields by default:

excludedExifTags = [
  "MWG:Description",
  "MakerNotes:City",
  "MakerNotes:State",
  "MakerNotes:Country",
  "MakerNotes:Location",
  "MakerNotes:Title"
]

Every entry must include its group. If you use Panasonic’s on-camera travel metadata, remove only the maker-note entries you trust. Keep MWG:Description excluded because its value can become stale when an XMP sidecar file replaces the underlying description.

The environment-variable form is a JSON array:

PS_EXCLUDED_EXIF_TAGS='["MWG:Description","MakerNotes:City","MakerNotes:State","MakerNotes:Country","MakerNotes:Location","MakerNotes:Title"]'

Rebuild your library after changing either setting.

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