I think ExifTool cannot handle the Japanese Shift-JIS character set but I wanted to make sure.
In my old application I supported this character set (and others like Arabian) so users could properly convert their IPTC data into UTF-8 and finally convert to XMP. Which was easy because Windows provides the corresponding routines for character set conversion. I guess Perl/Windows does not give Phil this flexibility and this is why ExifTool can support only the character sets listed under -CHARSET.
I use the iptc2xmp.arg files to perform the conversion. Is there a work around to get the Japanese descriptions etc. into XMP that way?
ExifTool handles Shift-JIS in EXIF. However, ExifTool does not support ISO 2022 shift codes in IPTC for 2 reasons:
1. I have never seen them used.
2. It would slow processing of IPTC
If you post an example and tell me exactly what you want to do I will see if I can help.
XMP is UTF-8, so it supports essentially all characters.
- Phil
I got the sample, thanks.
The EXIF ImageDescription and Artist are stored as UTF-8, and extracted properly by ExifTool.
The IPTC Caption-Abstract, By-line and ObjectName are garbage (all binary 0x3f, which is an ASCII question mark), as you can see from the -v3 output:
| + [IPTC directory, 72 bytes]
| | CurrentIPTCDigest = .a.B/.x...rj....
| | -- IPTCApplication record --
| | ApplicationRecordVersion = 2
| | - Tag 0x0000, IPTCApplication record (2 bytes, int16u):
| | 257b: 00 02 [..]
| | Caption-Abstract = ????????????
| | - Tag 0x0078, IPTCApplication record (12 bytes, string[0,2000]):
| | 2582: 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f [????????????]
| | By-line = ????
| | - Tag 0x0050, IPTCApplication record (4 bytes, string[0,32]):
| | 2593: 3f 3f 3f 3f [????]
| | ObjectName = ?????
| | - Tag 0x0005, IPTCApplication record (5 bytes, string[0,64]):
| | 259c: 3f 3f 3f 3f 3f [?????]
| | DigitalCreationDate = 20050807
| | - Tag 0x003e, IPTCApplication record (8 bytes, digits[8]):
| | 25a6: 32 30 30 35 30 38 30 37 [20050807]
| | DigitalCreationTime = 210614+0900
| | - Tag 0x003f, IPTCApplication record (11 bytes, string[11]):
| | 25b3: 32 31 30 36 31 34 2b 30 39 30 30 [210614+0900]
- Phil
Edit: If you wrote this IPTC with ExifTool, then reading FAQ number 10 (https://exiftool.org/faq.html#Q10) may help you to understand what needs to be done.