Exif tag copyright, symbol problems

[naike]

Hey.
I don't seem to be able to put a © symbol in the exif:copyright part.
I only get a weird symbol instead, any ideas?

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Naike,

The EXIF Copyright is problematic because it only supports ASCII characters according to the EXIF specification.  I suggest using "(c)" instead for this tag.

- Phil

[naike]

Hi, thanks for your reply.
But how does the ExifToolGUI write a © into the exif tags?

[Phil Harvey]

If you must write special characters to this tag, the MWG recommends that they be encoded in UTF-8.

How to generate a UTF-8 depends on your terminal and its settings.  FAQ number 18 deals with the problem of displaying UTF-8 in Windows.  Probably the most reliable way to do this is to write the copyright string to file using a text editor which supports UTF-8, then using "-copyright<=file.txt" to write this.

I'm not sure what Bogdan does in ExifToolGUI.  You could ask in the ExifTool GUI section of the forum.

- Phil

[BogdanH]

Hi,
Just saw this post...

But how does the ExifToolGUI write a © into the exif tags?

Before continuing: Phil is right on all this, of course.
That is, in most cases, Exif tags may contain ASCII characters only -and © isn't among them. Being an  "American Standard ...", it contain only basic (american) latin characters.

When I started with GUI, I've looked elsewhere and found out, that many of them are not reading/writting Exif metadata strictly by the book. To make usage of foreign characters possible, ANSI characters are used/allowed in Exif, which are properly displayed by most software. Thus, in GUI, the same approach is used (to avoid "..my name (Günther) is not properly displayed in GUI, but it is elsewhere..").
However, usage of ANSI characters doesn't guarantee, that all foreign characters will be displayed properly all over the world! -it depends regional settings on PC where data is readout.
In short: GUI uses/allows ANSI charset for Exif and Iptc; for Xmp, characters are translated to UTF-8.

Bogdan