names of persons in photo

[Storhaug]

I want to store the names of the persons shown in the photo. Seemingly two tags are available for that purpose:

-XMP-iptcExt:PersonInImage
-XMP-mediapro:People

Which one shall I use?
Or another one?

[Phil Harvey]

I would go with PersonInImage since this is a standard IPTC extension, rather than People which is a proprietary iView MediaPro tag.

- Phil

[Storhaug]

Thanks for your superfast reply.
Do I understand correct that -XMP-iptcExt:PersonInImage is an XMP-tag despite the "iptc" in its name?
I am asking because I read the FAQ section 10 about character sets. So, I wonder whether -XMP-iptcExt:PersonInImage uses UTF-8 (XMP), or cp1252 (IPTC) ?

[Phil Harvey]

There is some confusion now that the recent IPTC standard has moved to using XMP.  The tags that ExifTool calls IPTC are the older IPTC-NAA IIM specification, but the newer IPTC Photo Metadata standard uses the XMP format.

- Phil

[Storhaug]

So, do I understand right that it is currently not clear whether the tag uses UTF-8 or cp1252 ?

[Phil Harvey]

It doesn't sound like you understand.  XMP always uses UTF-8 internally but you can enter values using other character sets with the -charset option and ExifTool will do the conversion for you.

- Phil

[Storhaug]

Thanks for your patience. My Linux bash shell has these environment variables set:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
GDM_LANG=en_US.UTF-8

So, do I understand right that I do not need to use -charset because bash is using UTF-8 and that's the default for XMP ?

[Phil Harvey]

Correct, but for the wrong reason.

The relevant point is that UTF-8 is the default for reading/writing values via ExifTool.  ExifTool converts the encodings used by the various metadata formats, so the actual details of the encoding used by XMP do not change the way you read/write values via ExifTool.

I guess I should have been more clear.

- Phil