EXIF orientation info in PNGs isn't used for image-orientation: from-image

As a former metadata completionist, my mind starts to dissociate when I think about my battles with EXIF metadata, vendor-specific metadata, and the way different software supports, or refuses to support, any of it.

It gets even worse when ingesting images into Apple Photos, where you have to confront papercut bugs that you know will never be fixed.

I love ExifTool. It’s one of the great utilities. It works for almost every file I throw at it. But reading its output can be unsettling. It’s like getting a glimpse of eudaimonia, only to have it rudely interrupted by the reality of Apple Photos misreading every lens in your collection.

I've been trying to create clean metadata for a collection of Blu-ray rips recently. The MKV format has a bunch of defined metadata fields but handling of it is inconsistent between players. VLC seems to be the worst in that it doesn't even bother displaying important pieces of the metadata. You can work around that by effectively duplicating the important parts in the track name, but then other software ends up doubling up on that because it's displaying both the track name and the values pulled from the other track metadata. And I'm being driven crazy on how I should use the subtitle track flags that indicate if a track is Forced or Default, because it seems like the auto-selection behavior based on those flags arbitrary from player to player.

I should probably just give up and let it all be a mess. Not sure I'll be able to though. The only thing that freed me from metadata obsession when it came to my music collection is that I switched to streaming services.