Non standard encodings in IPTC and XMP tags

[Archive]

[Originally posted by jtebeest on 2009-06-12 06:47:04-07]

Hi,

First of all, great tool!

We have some files with strange encodings in the tags. Is there any way apart from iptc CodedCharacterSet (which is hardly ever set for the files we have) to determine the encoding beforehand?

Somehow Photoshop and Mac OSX have no troubles with these encodings. However, when I use xmptoolkit, I see the same weird characters.

We use exiftool on both Mac and windows, but there's no difference between the outputs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,
Jan

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2009-06-12 11:41:10-07]

Hi Jan,

As far as I know, Photoshop just uses the local character set
for special characters in IPTC.  The only reliable way to display
special characters is to use XMP and not IPTC.  Photoshop will
ignore IPTC if the same information exists in XMP,
perhaps this is why it is working for you.

- Phil

[Archive]

[Originally posted by jtebeest on 2009-06-17 10:58:07-07]

Hi Phil,

Thanks heeps for your reply.

To me it doesn't seem PS uses the local character set. When we use that character set to parse either IPTC/XMP the issue persists. The weird thing is though, that the encoding can't be parsed by us from the XMP either (not even when using Adobe's XMP Toolkit). So, it doesn't seem XMP is all that reliable at all, or I'm doing something terribly wrong. The latter is probably the case https://exiftool.org/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif" alt="Smiley" border="0" />

Well, I've gotten in touch with someone at Adobe who will try to get me in contact with on of their gurus. If I get this working, I'll post the solution here as well, maybe it will help someone else.

Cheers,
Jan

[Archive]

[Originally posted by exiftool on 2009-06-17 11:10:04-07]

Thanks Jan.  XMP is straight UTF-8, which is very standardized and
simple.  The only problem here is making sure you are able to properly
display UTF-8 characters.

- Phil