How to prevent Adobe software from damaging my metadata?

[oleaa]

Because of our editorial system and Norwegian language, I have to use Latin10 Scandinavian and choose not to write IPTC as Unicode in PM IPTC/XMP Preferences. If I didn't have to edit my pictures, everything would have been just fine.

But of course I have to route my pics through Lightroom 4.1 and Photoshop CS5. Every time I edit, I have to repair the metadata for Norwegian characters æøåÆØÅ.

It's a time consuming and very annoying problem, so any help and advice will be very much appreciated!

[Hayo Baan]

The encoding of xmp is always Unicode, the character encoding you specify is only for the embedded IPTC. As xmp is what Adobe uses (exclusively?) this is probably what's causing your issue. Perhaps it is something that goes wrong in PM or in Adobe software (eg UTF8 is not properly translated back to latin10 and vice versa). And/or that your IPTC/XMP preferences are not set up correctly to cover this situation correctly. Can you post a screenshot of your preferences as well as a sample image with all metadata present?

Cheers,
Hayo

[fotograhn]

A somewhat related question to this topic:

Let's say I have a RAW file or a saved JPEG with embedded IPTC/XMP metadata. How can I find out what character encoding is used in that particular file? I'm thinking of some kind of app that can show me the text content of the file, not the image itself. I'm using Mac OS X locally on my machine. 

Maybe the TextEdit app on Mac is good enough? However I cannot interpret what's in the file. What to look for to determine whether the transmitted image is encoded in Unicode or something else?

Thanks in advance!

[Kirk Baker]

A somewhat related question to this topic:

Let's say I have a RAW file or a saved JPEG with embedded IPTC/XMP metadata. How can I find out what character encoding is used in that particular file? I'm thinking of some kind of app that can show me the text content of the file, not the image itself. I'm using Mac OS X locally on my machine. 

Maybe the TextEdit app on Mac is good enough? However I cannot interpret what's in the file. What to look for to determine whether the transmitted image is encoded in Unicode or something else?

XMP is always UTF-8 encoded.  IPTC is either UTF-8 encoded or no encoding is specified so the characters should be interpreted as 7-bit ASCII (no accented characters, just a-z and A-Z, plus numbers and some symbols) or in the case of Adobe's software, interpreted as the default character set that your OS has currently set in its preferences.

In general, avoiding the use of IPTC is recommended if you're working with a language other than English, now that XMP is available.  Back when IPTC was the only metadata format for images, we had no other choice.

-Kirk

[Franz Dur]

If you open your image file (raw or jpg) with ExiftoolGUI it will show you the full ExifTool decoding of metadata of the image.

There are several tabs. At the top of the IPTC tab you will see something like:
CodedCharacterSet: UTF8 or Latin etc...

You'll find ExifToolGUI here: http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/exiftool/forum/index.php/topic,2750.0.html

Francis



 

[fotograhn]

Thank you Kirk for the explanation, I'll stick to the xmp format. 

Thank you Franz, I wish that tool was also available for Mac as I have no Windows machine.

EDIT: For Firefox (OS independent) I found this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/exif-viewer/
It reveals something about: "Coded Character Set = 27, 37, 71". Whatever that is?

[Franz Dur]

There is a (limited) exiftoolgUI for MAC, see here : http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/exiftool/forum/index.php?topic=4640.0

Have no Mac, so don't know if it will show character encoding. good luck

But Exiftool per se works on any platform, it is a Perl application. See the doc, it should be easy with a simple command line to make it display this info for your files

Francis

[fotograhn]

Thank you for that link, Franz. I have installed it but found the app to be very unstable. It crashes very often, and even f it doesn't, it wont always show me the metadata for all images. It's for free, however not reliable