Ah! In this case, you might be happy to discover that ExifTool just added an "image content" hash--it's the SHA (or MD5 or whatever) hash of the _actual image b

Ah! In this case, you might be happy to discover that ExifTool just added an "image content" hash--it's the SHA (or MD5 or whatever) hash of the _actual image bytes_, after ignoring the metadata header (and possible footer) payloads. So if you, say, change the rotation of your RAW image file (which normally will just add or change the EXIF `Orientation` tag), the image content hash will stay the same. See https://exiftool.org/ExifTool.html#ImageHashType https://exiftool.org/ExifTool.html#ImageHashType (of course, your current approach should prove substantively faster, but will only work with the formats that libraw supports)