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In which software are you seeing these errors, and is the EXIF metadata wrong when viewed in just one application or is it wrong in exactly the same way when viewed in multiple other applications?
Are they wrong straight out of camera (which would be very weird), or have they somehow gotten incorrect over time?
After hours of searching, I can't find a way to edit these errors within any Adobe products since it apparently only lets you edit IPTC, GPS, Keyword, and time stamp data.
By @LTH Mitchell
That is what you will generally find in the photo editing applications from the most well-known software companies. In general, much of the industry treats EXIF data as read-only, not to be messed with, especially for raw files with undocumented proprietary metadata that these developers do not want to corrupt accidentally. So most pro photo editing and management apps you find will let you edit only IPTC data and not EXIF.
In Lightroom Classic, the only raw file EXIF metadata it will let itself change is the capture time, and that option is off by default, again to lean towards protecting raw file integrity.
A tool that many might suggest for you is the free Exiftool. It has a long history, is widely used and known, and is so trusted that various well-known apps and utilities embed or call Exiftool to do their EXIF heavy lifting. It’s a command-line tool, so if you are not comfortable with that, it might not be an option.
There are some point-and-click GUI options. I use a Mac and am not very good at using the command line, so the software below is what I am familiar with. If you use Windows, I do not know what the options are other than Exiftool, but there must be something.
The first application shown below is GraphicConverter, and the second application is A Better Finder Attributes. They are respected and credible because both apps have been available, tried, and tested for around 30 years. Both do provide EXIF editing. Both are not free, but GraphicConverter is shareware so you can try it and only pay if you decide to keep using it. I verified that EXIF lens edits I make in these two apps do show up in other applications.
So far I've seen the exact same (wrong) MetaData in Lightroom, Bridge, and Windows File Explorer so it's not the application misreading it resyncs have not done anything. I also don't believe it's an issue coming right from the camera, I assume it's something that has happened over time. Like I mentioned I have files taken seconds before and seconds after with the same camera/lens that have the same Lens info while a few inbeteen say the lens was "fffffffffffffffff..."
The funny thing is that if it wasn't out of camera, or software's misreading it, and the EXIF is so locked down we can't change it; how have some of these changed themselves to "fffffff..." over time?
By @LTH Mitchell
That’s really odd, so one reason you don’t see much info about fixing it is because this specific kind of EXIF discrepancy just doesn’t come up very often in photography discussions as far as I know. I also don’t know how it could have ended up that way. One theory (which I am not saying is likely) is that at some point, the photos were managed by software that did alter the original EXIF data, even unintentionally, maybe due to a bug. But again, it’s not something I’ve heard of so I have a hard time believing that. I have no good answer as to how it happened.
The “ffffffff” could have been a metadata corruption problem with the original photo file, maybe. But that kind of data corruption doesn’t result in the other instances of perfectly spelled variations of lens models. 🙂 Very strange.
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