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Has anyone had luck reading metadata saved in Blender PNGs in Adobe products, or for that matter, any other products?

Reason: I rendered an animation on 5 computers using the non overwrite/placeholder method, but unfortunately on one computer I loaded the wrong version of the file (doh!). So every 5th frame or so is slightly inconsistent from the rest (different lighting, different hair particle configuration). Not pretty in an animation.

Luckily (or so I thought) I edited the metadata fields within Blender on each computer to put the name of that computer in the metadata, specifically in the note field for each PNG. However, in every application I've tried, from Windows, to Photoshop to Premiere to Adobe Bridge, nothing can find that metadata. I've searched for the computer name, for a note field, and tried to create a not field in Premiere. Nothing, anywhere seems to see it, but documentation says that PNGs support metadata within Blender.

I realize I'm using mostly Adobe products and while I'd love to be able to use them for this task, I'm open to other software suggestions for sure. Even within Blender if it is possible.

Can anyone give me a tip on finding this data and filtering it so ultimately I can delete all files created by one computer so I can rerender just those files?

Thanks heaps and bunches!

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  • $\begingroup$ imagemagick's identify command with the -verbose option usually spits out everything there is to know about a file for me (including blender-added metadata). May not be the most convenient solution on windows however. $\endgroup$
    – gandalf3
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 3:53
  • $\begingroup$ Did you consider reporting a bug to Adobe? $\endgroup$
    – ideasman42
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 7:44

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I just tried XNViewMP and it seems to be able to read Blender's metadata on both JPG and PNG Files.

JPEG seems to be using several comment fields, as opposed to PNG which uses dedicated ones for each information. It does save a File field with the name of the original Blend file it was rendered from, so if you had them saved under different locations while rendering from different computers you should be able to identify which files were from the wrong file from there I think.

XNViewMP has some search functionalities, maybe it can search EXIF info, not sure. Anyway it uses EXIFTool to extract this information, so if that fails maybe you could go there directly if XNView doesn't work for you.

Edit: Just to be clear, in XNView, open your image view and under view mode while previewing the image file right click on the image and select Properties then check the ExifTool tab

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  • $\begingroup$ Unfortunately (I forgot to include this in the original) the placeholder, non overwrite function renders all frames to a shared network directory, so no differentiation on which computer they came from there, at least that I can see. I'll try the other tools you listed, and as I get a better grip on the problem, send a report to Adobe. $\endgroup$
    – Blazer003
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 16:59
  • $\begingroup$ What matters is not where the rendered image was saved, but what blend file it was rendered from. Even if they were saved to the same network share, if the original file was named differently you can still identify where it came from. $\endgroup$
    – Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 17:22
  • $\begingroup$ Oh, duh! I was looking at it backwards. Thanks Duarte. $\endgroup$
    – Blazer003
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 19:12
  • $\begingroup$ Hope it helps, added some more detail to the answer $\endgroup$
    – Duarte Farrajota Ramos ♦
    Commented Mar 12, 2016 at 19:18

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