Hello,
First of all, I honestly tried to read the documentation, and, I have to admit, that I didn't understand much and the words there looked like magic spells to me. Because I am that smart, probably.
The problem is, that after using Picasa for a while, I switched to Shotwell. I think, the iptc tags were in CP1251 and now they are in CP1252. Now in Keywords Shotwell and Phatch see nothing and exiftool sees "Àìåðèêà" . I'm trying to convert it back.
I use: exiftool -charset iptc=cyrillic DSC04383.JPG and I see "Америка" in the output.
So, I use: exiftool -tagsfromfile @ -iptc:all -codedcharacterset= -charset iptc=Cyrillic DSC04383.JPG and i get the same "Àìåðèêà" in the Keywords tag. Only now it is in CP1251, I suppose. Anyway, I'm lost. Help me, please.
Thank you very much.
I see you have read FAQ 10 (https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q10). Great.
I would not advise using any character set other than UTF-8 in IPTC because software has no way to tell what the character set was. Also, CP1252 probably doesn't support some characters you require anyway. So I would suggest following the example in FAQ 10 and converting to UTF-8, but as you discovered you need to add -charset iptc=Cyrillic (or -charset iptc=cp1251, or -charset iptc=russian) to read the existing IPTC correctly:
exiftool -tagsfromfile @ -iptc:all -codedcharacterset=UTF8 -charset iptc=cp1251 DSC04383.JPG
This should generate IPTC readable by any application that understands UTF-8 encoding.
BTW: You shouldn't feel bad. The IPTC character encoding is confusing!
- Phil
Now I feel great. Thank you.