MWG Nuance

[JMac]

Hi Phil,

Playing with the MWG stuff - very nice!  Of course, there is a twist introduced by the Camera makers...  I have two different Canon Powershot cameras that have the very unfortunate characteristic of inserting an EXIF:ImageDescription filled with spaces.  When my wife uses Picasa to caption these pictures, it write IPTC:Caption-Abstract, but now the MWG module can't reconcile the Description field because it sees two different things in the two fields.  If I delete the bogus EXIF:ImageDescription, it all works fine.  Sample image from Canon with blank EXIF:ImageDescription attached...

Its an interesting question whether this is valid behavior for the camera, and Picasa's metadata handling is dodgy at best, but neither of those is likely to change... Any thoughts on an option in exiftool to treat a tag comprised purely of whitespace as non-existent for the purposes of MWG reconciliation?

FYI, I have two other Canons (an older powershot, and a DSLR) that DON'T behave this way.  Nothing like consistency!

[Phil Harvey]

The EXIF specification states that some tags should be ignored if they are blank (Make, Model, Software, Artist, Copyright and Date/Time tags).  Although it doesn't state that ImageDescription may be left blank, this is a reasonable extrapolation.

However, the MWG specification does not indicate that blank EXIF tags should be handled in any special way.  But I think your idea is good, and I will implement it in the next release.

- Phil