iPhone 5: suddenly no more EXIF Data

[rreyer]

I'm having a weird problem with my iPhone pictures suddenly having no EXIF data anymore (they actually do, but not in iMatch).

I came across a nasty sorting problem with an iPhone picture.
Found, that this picture doesn't seem to have EXIF data - it DOES HAVE good EXIF data in FS Viewer and in the EXIF Tool Command Processor!

Only in iMatch in the regular browser there seems to be a problem:
- EXIF data stops to be present (in iMatch) from one day to the next
- EXIF data CONTINUES to work from one moment to the next (literally: two pictures only seconds apart, one's broken, the next works)

So, I have a bunch of files (59, and maybe many more hidden in my DB) that are not sorted properly because the EXIF data is not present.

What does it look like?
- the files are not sorted correctly (date is ok, time is not)
- in the Metadata Browser there is NO EXIF data
  (other iPhone pictures are ok and show plenty of EXIF data)
  (FS Viewer shows ok EXIF data even for these broken files)

Have you ever seen this?
How can I fix this?

Many thanks!

[rreyer]

Ok, I've removed all the "broken" pictures from the DB and added them again and the problem seems to be fixed.
At least for these 59 pictures.
... add them back in ...
... restore categories ...
... check the sorting ...
... return to where I actually found the problem ...

Is there a way to filter images that don't show proper EXIF data?

[rreyer]

Ok, I'm slowly getting there:

I found that SHIFT-CTRL-F5 opens a dialog that can reload just the Metadata of the selected files/folder hierarchies.
This will actually fix my problem.
Unfortunately I still don't know, what went wrong with the files.

I did a lot of clicking, reading, googling, right-clicking, etc. to find this solution.
This shows that I'm a not very experienced user (even though I'm using iMatch since 2008).

...

[PaulS]

There was an EXIFTool bug that caused some metadata problems in IMatch for a brief time period until it was diagnosed by Mario and fixed in EXIFTool by Phil.  This could be the issue you saw if you added images to your database with a version of IMatch that shipped with the affected version of EXIFTool.  See the following thread for details:

https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=3731.msg24877#msg24877

[Mario]

The problem mentioned has been fixed in recent ExifTool versions.
Rescanning the Metadata of existing files exhibiting the problem with <Shift>+<Ctrl>+<F5> > Reload Metadata reloads the metadata without affecting any other data (e.g. categories assigned to the files or Attributes).

Instead of using <Shift>+<Ctrl>+<F5> you can also hold down <Ctrl> while choosing the Rescan command from the folder context menu or the context menu in the file window. For details, search for the keyword Rescan in the IMatch help index. Then scroll down to the Advanced Rescan options topic.