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With a Canon 1D X, when I look through the view finder or look at the "Info" panel (having set up particular options), the camera knows if it is tilted slightly left or right and also knows if it is tilted slightly up or down. Or, to rephrase, it has an electronic level within the camera. Is this information stored in the metadata when the picture is taken and, if so, what is the name of the fields?

When I dump out the metadata using exiftool -a -u image.cr2 I do not see anything that might be it. Google doesn't seem to find any hits. "Crop Angle" is not in the metadata.

I'm not talking about "Orientation" of Horizontal or Vertical. I'm more interested in the slight tilting of the camera.

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As far as I know the answer is no, roll/pitch data is not recorded in EXIF data. I have a 60D which also offers a "digital level" or "artificial horizon" when composing a shot but this information is not preserved in the output EXIF data. There's a good site here with comprehensive information about standard EXIF data and parameters, and there are pages with manufacturers' own metadata tags - you may want to take a look at the Canon page. Camera roll/pitch isn't listed and does not appear as part of the specification, both in the general EXIF specification and in Canon's own tags - there are however a number of Canon tags marked as "unknown", these may contain fine orientation data or could be reserved for future use.

I can certainly see value in such data as it would allow automatic image rotation to correct wonky horizons etc., but I assume this hasn't been adopted into the EXIF specification due to the limited number of cameras featuring a digital level indicator.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Thank you. I will wait a day or two to see if there is another reply and then mark this as correct. You guessed why I want the info. I want to do automatic correction of roll. It seem like an obvious next step. (perhaps writing a LR5 plugin to do it). \$\endgroup\$
    – pedz
    Mar 17, 2015 at 22:57
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    \$\begingroup\$ One possible way to find out if its one of the undocumented parameters would be to set a camera such as yours on a tripod with a geared head under controlled lighting conditions. The geared head would allow you to make relatively accurate roll adjustments. Then you could take a series of pictures which should output essentially identical EXIF data (discarding date and time which will obviously change between shots). Then you could see which "unknown" parameters change (if any), and see if any of these correlate with the changes in the angle of roll. Just an idea... \$\endgroup\$
    – Darkhausen
    Mar 17, 2015 at 23:10
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    \$\begingroup\$ Don't forget to feed the information back to exiftool development if you do figure it out! For whatever it's worth, Olympus records PitchAngle and RollAngle as signed 16-bit integers. \$\endgroup\$ Mar 18, 2015 at 1:07
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    \$\begingroup\$ I tried Darkhausen's method four or five different ways even writing a Ruby script to find fields that ascend and descend and could not find any field that made any consistent sense. I updated my firmware to the latest as well. \$\endgroup\$
    – pedz
    Mar 21, 2015 at 20:44
  • \$\begingroup\$ That's a shame. Obviously you will have filtered out the known parameters but (purely out of curiosity) I'd like to know how many of the unknown parameters changed between shots. I might have a play with EXIF data from my 60D at some point, it may be easier to detect a roll parameter with this model as it only has roll-axis sensing as opposed to yours which has roll and pitch... \$\endgroup\$
    – Darkhausen
    Mar 21, 2015 at 22:17

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