2006.06.06 12:59 "[Tiff] TIFF dump utility", by Phil Harvey

There is a tool that many of you probably aren't familiar with that can be very useful for visualizing the IFD structure of a TIFF file. The ExifTool utility has a feature where it will dump TIFF/EXIF information in HTML format. As an example, here is a sample output for a TIFF image:

http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/htmldump_sample.html

The one quirk is that image data shows up as "unused bytes" since this is meta information utility and doesn't deal with image data. This output is specifically designed for debugging problems decoding EXIF meta information in JPEG images (including the maker notes information if it uses an IFD structure), but it also works well when run on TIFF images.

ExifTool is a set of Perl modules with an included command-line application, and can be downloaded from http://owl.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

- Phil Harvey