IPTC not readable

[anthony]

Hi,
I work for a company that receives thousands of images a day and we display IPTC information with the images we are sent. Recently two separate clients who use Photo Mechanic to caption their images have experienced problems with the IPTC. On some images the IPTC would come through empty even though they had captioned as with other images that showed the caption in IPTC. With the blank images when opened in Photoshop I can see the caption but not in other IPTC viewers. On further inspection there appears to be certain tags missing from the IPTC. Another situation was an image that the client had received from a photographer and re-captioned themselves in Photo Mechanic and sent to us and we could only see the original caption in the IPTC.

Can you please shed some light on why this might be occurring so that I can advise my clients on how to avoid this issue.

Thanks

[Kirk Baker]

I work for a company that receives thousands of images a day and we display IPTC information with the images we are sent. Recently two separate clients who use Photo Mechanic to caption their images have experienced problems with the IPTC. On some images the IPTC would come through empty even though they had captioned as with other images that showed the caption in IPTC. With the blank images when opened in Photoshop I can see the caption but not in other IPTC viewers. On further inspection there appears to be certain tags missing from the IPTC. Another situation was an image that the client had received from a photographer and re-captioned themselves in Photo Mechanic and sent to us and we could only see the original caption in the IPTC.

Can you please shed some light on why this might be occurring so that I can advise my clients on how to avoid this issue.

How are the images being sent to you?  Via an uploader in Photo Mechanic like FTP?  If so, it is a common mistake for people to apply an IPTC Stationery Pad during the upload that clears out various fields.  It is easy to uncheck the checkbox in the uploader to disable the application of the IPTC Stationery Pad which would solve the issue I described.

Without knowing the entire chain of events from the time the image is captioned in Photo Mechanic to the point where you receive the images, it would be hard to tell you what is going on.

-Kirk