xptitle with German "Umlaute"

[sonnenschein78]

Hi Phil,

I am a newbie to Exiftool but I have to admit that it is really a great tool. I can do so much stuff with my digital pics that I have never thought that there is tool like Exiftool. Thanks for that!

I have only one issue: how can I write German "Umlaute" (special characters like ü, ö and ä) to the xptitle attribute?

When I try a command like this ...

"C:\Exiftool\exiftool" -charset exif=Latin -overwrite_original_in_place -exif:imagedescription= -exif:xptitle="Ich laufe über die Wiese" "IMG_5059.JPG"

it does not work.

Re-writing ü with ü does not work either.

Is there a chance to succeed?

Thanks for a small hint.

Regards,
Klaus

[StarGeek]

Try adding the -L option option to your command.

The problem is that Windows CMD doesn't deal well with non-ascii characters.  See FAQ #18 for more details.

Myself, I've never been able to get special characters to work and I end up using the html entity as in your last example.  You need to add the -E (escapeHTML) option to make that option work.

[sonnenschein78]

Thank you so much for your help. Now I've tried it but it did not work!! 

Do you have an idea why the statement below did not work properly?

"C:\Exiftool\exiftool" -E -overwrite_original_in_place -exif:imagedescription= -exif:xptitle="Wir laufen über die Wiese" "C:\temp\IMG_5059.JPG"


I try to write the German Umlaut "ü" which is coded as ü in HTML formatting.

Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Klaus

[StarGeek]

It worked here.  It shows up properly when you look at Windows Properties -> Details tab -> Title.

If you're listing it through exiftool in CMD on Windows and getting something like über, see my first post for the -L option or FAQ 18.

[sonnenschein78]

Hi,

Yesterday I have tested the command with the "-E" option at my old Windows XP installation and to my big surprise everything went fine. The texts were displayed correctly even on my Win 10 PC afterwards. So my temporary solution is to use the Exiftool command from above on the old installation.

Do you have any idea why the command works well on Win XP Pro and not on an Win 10 Pro 64 bit installation??? I am using the latest version of Exiftool 11.65...

But thanks again for your help...

[StarGeek]

Do you have any idea why the command works well on Win XP Pro and not on an Win 10 Pro 64 bit installation???

I don't know why it's different for you, since it works correctly for me and I'm also on Windows 10 Pro 64 bit.

You still haven't explained how it didn't work.  It's hard to troubleshoot the problem when I don't know what actually happened.

[sonnenschein78]

Hi,

When I execute by batch script under Win 10 Pro 64 bit edition and there are German "Umlaute" in there like ä, ö, ü which are HTML coded like ü then the command window pops up and disappears directly after that. But nothing happened with the text in xptitle. If I execute such a script without umlaute then it is ok.

Yesterday I have executed a large batch script on my old Win XP Installation then everything worked fine.

On Win 10 my user account has only restricted access rigths in Win 10. On Win XP I have my own adminstrator rights.

Could this be the reason why it works on Win XP but not on Win 10? Or this there possibly any other reason?

[StarGeek]

Is it the exact same batch on both machines?

What is the exact command line in the batch script?

Are you sure there are double quotes around the part of the command that contains the ampersand?  Does that part of the command include a Start directive?

The fact that a new CMD window pops up seems to indicate that the part of the command that contains the ampersand is getting directly processed by CMD.  In Windows CMD, the ampersand is a special CMD character that indicates the start of a second command to be run in sequence.  For example, if you type something like:
mkdir NewDir&cd NewDir
That will create a new directory and make it the current directory.  So in the case of your command, Windows is somehow seeing this as two separate commands:
"C:\Exiftool\exiftool" -E -overwrite_original_in_place -exif:imagedescription= -exif:xptitle="Wir laufen
<Enter>
uuml;ber die Wiese" "C:\temp\IMG_5059.JPG"
Which of course, won't do anything except return errors.

Usually in CMD, you can put double quotes around the part that contains the ampersand.  I did find this StackOverflow question that may be relevant if you are using Start.

Still don't know why it would work differently under XP, though.

[Mannifly]

Hi,
I am also a newbie with Exiftool and found it as solution of an important problem. In a project of a student with an Access Database within more than 11ooo Items we had a lot of pictures to index with keywords. It was easy to define a report in Access with an output as batchfile but the same problems as mentioned above. After reading this topic I searched more in Google and found the easy solution: write the following command as first line in your windows batchfile: chcp 1252 . Thats it

Best regards
Manfred