The code below works, but I cannot 'interleave' the conditionals on the two files. If I read the XMP directly from the get-go, it works just fine, so I am getting the impression that I cannot read two ExifTool structures at the same time (which can't be right I have to be the error here). Goes to my $exifInfoXMP = ImageInfo($filePathXMP) īut that keeps failing. I therefore tried to open a second instance of ExifTool, such as: my $exifInfo = ImageInfo($filePath) So, I want to have code that says 'if you read a field/tag from the raw file and it isn't there, look at the associated XMP file, and if that fails, return a blank string.' The problem is when I read from a raw file-which obviously doesn't have custom fields-I would get an error with an uninitialized value. Looking at the exiftool documentation on both the ExifTool site and CPAN, I was able to read tagged jpeg and the XMP sidecar files, both without issues.

The goal is to read XMP fields from a photo file. I am new to PERL and even newer to ExifTool-and am therefore likely missing something quite basic.

Perl exiftool