Invalid EXIF text encoding for UserComment

[Leonard WHYTE]

I've attached a screenshot of the relevant parts of htmldump0 output for the file that exiftool generates this error.

Can anyone explain why this message is generated?  Surely, the zero terminated string "Unicode" lies within the UserComment, but these are just ASCII characters and don't seem to me to be worthy of this "Invalid EXIF text encoding for UserComment" warning.

Any ideas

[StarGeek]

The first 8 bytes are what designates the encoding.  See this chart from the EXIF spec docs


If you compare the 8 bytes in the unicode entry, 55 4E 49 43 4F 44 45 00, you can see that it is different than what is in your file, 55 6e 69 63 6f 64 65 00.  In other words, a valid EXIF text encoding would be UNICODE, not Unicode.  Whatever program wrote the UserComment entry didn't pay attention to the specs.

[Leonard WHYTE]

Understood.  Thankyou so much.