Fotostation problem... Fix? alternative?

[Julie with a camera]

Hi everyone! I'm new to the forum.

I am a photographer with average tech skills and I found the forum researching metadata information so maybe someone will be able to help me with this. If you feel I might get an answer on an other forum, I'm also opened to suggestions.
So here's the issue:  I use a software called StockSubmitter to keyword-submit images to stock photography agencies and an other software called FotoStation as my database to organise my images into groups and add custom metadata field to my images so I can know where I am in the workflow. I also work on files that are synced to my computer from Dropbox.

I think Fotostation is playing with the metadata somehow because sometimes it adds weird metadata that reads like chinese characters in StockSubmitter. It doesn't always do that though, it affects about 10% of my folders, sometimes the full folder, sometimes part of the folder... haven't figured the logic yet.

I used a website called Get-metadata.com and it seems to add those character to fields called XP Titles, Keywords and Subject.

I guess i'm looking for a 3 part solution:

1- how to fix the images that are already affected
2-how do I prevent this from happening in the future ( most likely something inside FotoStation, but not sure)
3- If there is no fix, is there an other database program that allows users to add custom metadata fields like word, dates, y-n fields?


Thanks! I'll appreciate any help I can get!

Julie

[Julie with a camera]

Here are some printscreens of the issue:

[Phil Harvey]

Hi Julie,

My guess is that this is a byte-order problem, and that the affected files are big-endian byte order.  XP tags should always be stored in little-endian byte order, and in a big-endian file there are two ways this could go wrong:

Either

1.FotoStation writes XP tags in big-endian byte order.

or

2. StockSubmitter interprets little-endian characters as big-endian.

You can use ExifTool to check this:

exiftool -exifbyteorder -xpkeywords -xptitle -xpsubject FILE

If the tags look OK in ExifTool and the ExifByteOrder is Big-endian, but they look wrong in StockSubmitter, then StockSubmitter is the problem.  To work around this, you could use ExifTool to change the byte order (see FAQ 20 for details):

exiftool -all= -tagsfromfile @ -all:all -unsafe -icc_profile -exifbyteorder=II FILE

- Phil

[Julie with a camera]

Great!! I'll test it out later and I'll keep you posted 

[Julie with a camera]

OK. So the files are written in little endian as you suspected, and the metadata came out as gibberish. I was able to change to bigendian using the command you gave me and it fixed some of the files I was having trouble with... The problem is that some of the files are still giving me gibberish metadata even after the conversion to big endian... Any thoughts?

[Phil Harvey]

If you could send me one of the bad files I'll take a look. My email is philharvey66 at gmail.com

- Phil

[StarGeek]

I went ahead and downloaded StockSubmitter to take a look at it.  I am a bit surprised that it gives priority to the XP* tags, as those are pretty much just a Windows thing.  I think this is the first program I've come across that can actually read those tags.

The program can read IPTC and XMP metadata, so one possible answer would be to just trash the XP* tags.  You could run this command:
exiftool -P -EXIF:XP*= <FileOrDir>
and that would clear all the XP tags, allowing StockSubmitter to read the XMP and IPTC data.  Test it out first, of course, though I doubt there would be a problem as I'm pretty sure Fotostation writes to XMP and IPTC.