So you’ve done a photo shoot in RAW, spent time adjusting each photo’s composition, and saved the final results to a set of JPGs. Now you want to geo-tag the set, GeoSetter appears to correctly geo-locate each photo, all looks good until you save changes and get:

Warning: Unknown format (800) for SubIFD tag 0x0
Warning: [minor] Entries in SubIFD were out of sequence. Fixed.
Error: Bad format (800) for SubIFD entry 0

Now you can’t save the updates, you can’t GeoTag your photos. Ok, so we try Google’s GPicSync, but it also fails. If you enable storing the Lat/Lon as keywords, that does work, but neither can seem to modify the lat/long of the image.

So we need to strip out the offending unrecognized data for these programs to correctly store the location, but keep the neccessary information such as time stamps. And we need to do so in a batch process, we don’t want to have to hand edit the EXIF data for each image. Many of the high level photo management tools (including GPicSync and GeoSetter) depend on the low-level tool ExifTool.

Using the Window’s GUI interface to this tool, it will report the Nikon information as warnings, data it does not understand. Unfortunately, I saw no way to tell the tool to remove that block of data from the image, only to modify data within sections it understood.

What did work was the tool ViewNX which is provided by Nikon.  Select the images and from the File menu click Convert Files… Check the Box “Remove XMP/IPTC information”, leave the others unchecked and click Convert…

Now the unknown parts are removed, and GeoSetter will have no problems re-saving the files after geo-tagging.