Curious persistent error warning on newly imported photo images

[BanjoTom]

My son and his family took a short weekend camping trip, during which my daughter-in-law shot and forwarded to me 5 .jpg images taken with her iPhone 14.  On importing them into IMatch, each showed the error message seen as a yellow triangle warning, as shown in the right-hand image on the attached screenshot file.  When clicked, the error message says: "There was an error while reading metadata from this file. The file may be corrupted or currently locked by another application."

Yet no other applications were running.  And, curiously, all 5 photo files seemed to act completely normally in IMatch, allowing me to add metadata (Headline, description, map data, etc.), and to write back that metadata with no problems.  But the error warning persists, even after rebooting the PC and restarting IMatch and rescanning the files.

I was able to clear the error warning, however, with this procedure: I opened the left-hand image from the same group of photos in Adobe Photoshop, and viewed the "File Info" (i.e., metadata) in that app, then saved the .jpg image without changes.  After that, on rescanning the photo in IMatch, the error warning has now disappeared.

I don't understand why these images were flagged with the error warning, nor why opening and then re-saving them in Photoshop (with no other changes) removed that warning.  

Can you help me understand what may have caused this behavior? 

[Mario]

What does the Error Error tag value show for these files?
You can use this variable to show it:

Code Select Expand

{File.MD.Extra\Error\Error\0}
Or the tooltip of the yellow warning icon when you hover the mouse over the icon?

When you reload the metadata of the file using Shift+Ctrl+F5 > Reload Metadata and ExifTool returns a warning or error, it will be written to the IMatch log file. That info would be helpful.

Tip: Search the "Did You Know?" app for error to find a topic that explains all this in detail.

[BanjoTom]

Tried using the variable you suggested  {File.MD.Extra\Error\Error\0} in VarToy, but it showed nothing. Hovering the mouse pointer over the error warning only shows the message I already quoted in my original question: 

  "There was an error while reading metadata from this file. The file may be corrupted or currently locked by another application."
 
I did do a rescan using Shift+Control+F5, and the attached zipped log file does contain references to some errors, but I don't understand what they are or -- more importantly -- how to correct them.

Thanks for whatever you can suggest! 

[Mario]

Are these files produced by a recent iPhone?
Because IMatch logs the warning "ET-Parser Error : 'A name contained an invalid character.", which is caused by ExifTool producing some invalid HTML for some Apple metadata tags, preventing IMatch from importing the metadata.
There is a related bug report and I'm waiting for ExifTool version 12.64 which has a fix.

[BanjoTom]

YES, the photos were taken on a recent iPhone, for sure!  Thanks for your quick analysis, Mario.  I can ignore the issue until a new Exiftool can fix it, since everything seems to work properly when handling those images in IMatch.