Brendan.
Brendan, (since it is in a non-standard location and is not seen by Photoshop.)
crazy shit! are there really more possible places in a jpg file for the IPTC-caption? I cant beliefe that.
especially because I can read the fotostation-caption with any program like IrfanView, XnView.. and FS is a very often used software. (okay, Microsoft too)
but now you have these files and I'm looking forward to your analyses
I have looked at your file (DSC_3473.JPG). It contains three captions. The first is the IPTC record found in the Photoshop marker (standard location) which has the updated caption. The second is an XMP record (in the standard location for XMP) which contains the old caption. The third is the IPTC record placed at the end of the file by Fotostation which also has the updated caption.
Adobe Photoshop prefers to use XMP when available. It appears that Fotostation does not update XMP data but does seem to update IPTC data in the standard location and in the non-standard location.
You can instruct Photo Mechanic not to create XMP data and this particular problem will be fixed, though it is not a long-term solution. XMP is definitely the future (and present for that matter) for captioning images. Do the Fotostation people have a newer version that supports XMP?
I can safely say that FTP As is not causing your problem since it is not modifying the files in your case. The root of the problem is that there is stale XMP data (which would not be stale if you used PM for all of the captioning since PM keeps both IPTC and XMP up-to-date) in the files.
Thanks for the samples.
-Kirk