DNGs, PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor
It is great when I get emails from users of PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor. Some emails are bug reports, some are suggestions, some are complaints, some are users complaining the programs are too cheap 
… anyway, what ever they are please keep them coming.
Recently I have had some great emails:
Michael emailed me with the report of PhotoGPSEditor crashing. This was the new release (version 1.5.3 – read the post) that was causing the problems, and as he sent the ‘crash log’ I could easily locate and solve the problem (took all of 30 minutes) and a new version was posted this evening (version 1.5.4 – read the post). Thanks Michael.
Tony emailed to say how useful he found PhotoInfoEditor and sent in a few suggestions for changes. What was spooky was 75% of the changes he suggested have already been added to the new version of PhotoInfoEditor, which is currently undergoing testing. Again, thanks Tony.
Kim from Korea emailed to report that PhotoGPSEditor would not display DNG images produced by his camera. We have had a long email chat about the problem and he really helped me chase the problem by providing examples of problem DNG files .
As Kim said: “The kids wear Korean traditional clothes and shoes. Shape of Hair means my hometown symbol pine tree.”
First, Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) supports DNG (or so it claims) ‘out of the box’. And indeed it seems to. However, the DNGs Kim sent would not open in Preview, and would not display in PhotoGPSEditor (they reported a formatting error in the debugger). Some digging in the code of PhotoGPSEditor showed that the things really weren’t working as expected. The files were being loaded, but would not translate to an image. Some more work, and a change in the code, and the files Kim had sent (plus some photos from other users), now worked. As a final test I asked Kim for one more example of the type of DNG file his camera produced. And guess what? It wouldn’t load in to PhotoGPSEditor. This was odd… I thought that maybe the file had been damaged ‘in transit’ as Preview also couldn’t open it, but when I tried Photoshop, success! An image! Great! The file was OK, but PhotoGPSEditor didn’t work!
I then tried the file again with PhotoGPSEditor, and it showed a preview image…. odd…. After some ‘experiments’, using an unopened version of the file, I discovered that the act of opening the DNG file in Photoshop, and then closing the file WITHOUT A SAVE ‘fixed’ the photo so it could be displayed by PhotoGPSEditor. How, or why this happens I have no idea!
What was also interesting was that even when PhotoGPSEditor could not display an image from the DNGs, it could still write the meta-data (location information etc.) to the file when it was saved. Therefore, I have now added a ‘feature’ to PhotoGPSEditor that states that the image can’t be viewed, but that the program should still be able to write the meta-data.
If PhotoGPSEditor encounters a file that it can write meta-data to, but can’t display an image, it now states the fact!
These improvements in image handling, and the reporting of ‘problem’ images, will be added to the next version of PhotoInfoEditor.
PhotoInfoEditor and PhotoGPSEditor are freeware programs from MMISoftware – continued development can be supported by making donations (PhotoInfoEditor Donation | PhotoGPSEditor Donation), or purchases at the MMISoftware GPS and camera stores.
Both programs are available for download:
