Photoclubalpha

RawTherapee shows the lens ID embedded in Sony RAW -- so I know it is there. Can anyone help me get this lens ID using ACR / CS3? It does not seem to be in the EXIF string from which I have successfully extracted ISO, FL and f-stop using a JavaScript. I am writing a CS3 JavaScript and need the lens ID.
Thanks
Bert

It is probably present in a section of metadata (file header information) known as MakerNote, not EXIF. CS3 can't see MakerNote data as far as I know. Accessing it would be something only an expert programmer could help you with.

David

Lightromm 2.5 is the first version that can extract the lens info from the maker notes. Lightroom 2.5 uses ACR 5.5 which I think requires either LR 2.5 or CS4 to use it.

Thanks guys. I will give up on CS3 and pursue other approaches.
Bert

Bert,

you can use Javascript to issue a call to ExifTool which excerpts the Lens ID (and Teleconverter ID and many more Minolta/Sony Maker Note entries) from the image's metadata and writes it into a disk file, then use more Javascript code to open and to read that file. That's what I do to transfer the lens info into the XMP tags aux:Lens and aux:LensInfo via a Bridge script.

You can download ExifTool from Phil Harvey's webpage. Use the Windows executable (or the Mac executable if you're on a Mac). In order to process many image files with one single call to ExifTool, build an argument file in Javascript, write it to disk, and call (with strArgumentFileName being a string variable containing the path and name of your argument file). If you're familiar with Perl scripts (I'm not) then it's even easier because at the core, ExifTool is nothing but a collection of Perl scripts. The Windows and Mac executables however do not rely on a Perl interpreter; they are stand-alone programs.

For details about using ExifTool and the format of the argument file see ExifTool's documentation. Of course, you may just as well call ExifTool on each single image file, like this: but with many images that's inefficient. (Here, the -n option returns the numerical values of the IDs; without that option ExifTool would translate these into human-readable strings automatically.) By the way, a nice graphical user Interface to ExifTool is ExifToolGUI for Windows. It helps exploring the capabilities of ExifTool as well as what's hiding inside the MakerNotes section of your image files.

Using ExifTool has a bit of a learning curve but it's worth it. Calling ExifTool from Javascript is an extremely powerful method to handle and to process metadata, including brand-specific Maker Notes. It has solved many metadata headaches for me.

-- Olaf

Great help. Thanks very much. Last night I googled "Makernotes" and discovered ExifTool and was thinking along the lines you suggested. I dragged and dropped a couple of Sony RAW files onto ExifTool and was impressed with the amount of data present in the RAW file (including the Lens number/description) Your specific help has encouraged me and I will pursue this approach. I will post my failure or success. Thanks again,
Bert