The scan reads the first 256 KB of a file for its metadata. A camera
writes its IFDs at the front, so that is the whole structure; the linear
DNG a merge writes puts its first IFD after the pixels, and rawler,
given the head alone, finds no decoder in it. The composite was
catalogued without a date and sorted to the very end of the grid, after
every dated photograph — which is where a panorama merged on the tablet
went unfound.
dr-decode's own TIFF reader now reads through a head and a tail at a
known offset; trailing_ifd says where the tail starts and
metadata_split reads the two together. The scan, when the head fails
and points beyond itself, fetches from the IFD to the end — kilobytes —
and dates the file from both. Tested against the writer's own output.
dtourolle
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