Reading Unicode metadata

[jean]

Hello
I have JPEGs with unicoded metadata (cyrillic).
How can i display these metadata ?
I use exiftool.exe, Windows XP

[Phil Harvey]

I think that reading FAQ 18 and maybe FAQ 10 too may help.

- Phil

[jean]

I create a process that reads the IPTC metadata in a JPEG.
The metadata are written to a text file then i read the text file to parse the infos.
I use the following command line:

exiftool -IPTC:all -L file.jpg >report.txt

In the report.txt the insfos are not correct:

[IPTC] Keywords: Àíäðåé, Èâàí, Òàðàñ
[IPTC] By-line: Ïåòðîâ Ïåòð

[Christian Etter]

Hi,
two suggestions: first, do not use the -L option. Cyrillic letters cannot be represented in Latin1 encoding. Second, make sure your text editor a) supports UTF-8 and b) will open the file as UTF-8. I would recommend Notepad++ for this purpose.

You can find more information about ExifTool and Unicode on my web page: http://www.christian-etter.de/?tag=exiftool

Christian

[jean]

Hi
I removed the -L option.
Notepad usually displays correctly the cyrillic metadata, i'm going to your blob, thanks for the tip 

[jean]

I did not find anything that allows to get correct unicode text. 
Did someone succeed ?

[Christian Etter]

Please make sure the files you are reading contain 100% correct Unicode meta data. Chances are that you might have written incorrect or non-unicode meta data, so it is an impossible task to get back correct Unicode.
If you are writing cyrillic characters, only use a UTF-8 encoded argfile with the -@ option. (There is a way to use UTF-8 in the command line, but it is a bit confusing at first).
When reading, write the output to a text file, do not use the -L option.
To get more help, you should post all commands you are executing.

Chris

[jean]

I have attached the file (it's a small one).
It has cyrillic EXIF (Image Description) and IPTC (Caption-abstract, some keywords)
These metadata are not correctly read by Exiftool 

[Christian Etter]

Text is in UTF-8 format, it reads out fine. Try:

exiftool -location IMG_0650_web.jpg>location.txt

then open the text file with a UTF-8 aware editor. "St. Isaac's Cathedral (Исаакиевский Собор)" This should solve the problem.

Christian

[Phil Harvey]

I'm glad Christian is here to help you with Windows quirks.  Thanks Christian.

Here is the information as extracted in a Mac terminal:



- Phil