IMO, you are facing one of life's most daunting challenges: describing the fishbowl while residing inside it. I've written documentation and supported products I've developed in the past, so I feel your pain on this. It easy to document a wooden wheel, it's more complex to document the exact functioning of all clockwork in a swissmechanical watch. I think it's also part of the incredible posibilities of that piece of software that make it difficult to explain. Not only the tool itself is more than good in my opinion, the only documentation also is way beyond expectation complete and good. The people in the rest quadrants will likely not be happy. I assume you can only satisfy 1 or 2 of the resulting six matrix quadrants with whatever approach.

developer like) or enduser type ('I dont need to understand it, I want it to work' 'Press A for typical install'). I see three levels of exiftool skills/experience as one segmentation dimension (newbie/used coupleof times/power user) and then the other as technology-prone (e.g.

In communications there is no 'one size fits all' IMHO. I guess this thing could end up in a whole philosophical discussion on approaches to online education methodology for grown-ups.īasically I think to get anywhere you fare best if you define the target audience precisely first. For example for me as non English native speaker reading 'DSTTAGagree, and this is why most of my examples are simple and do just one thing. Any commands discussed here which do multiple things in one line I experience as counterproductive as they confuse me too much. I tried approaching it from this angle, but the problem is that reading through examples to list all possible common uses of exiftool would take more time than reading the full documentation. I personally always look for examples which come close to my situation and then from the example look backwards to the abstract command help to try to figure out what happens. Hence, ExifTool is software for desperate users. You can bet he dumps the thing immediately if he's not desperate. The best thing to stop a user from using an application is always telling him 'read the fucking manual' only once.

Exiftoolfor windows