IPTC-NAA in PM5; how to ID and update

[nancyr]

Since PM5 no longer reads the IPTC-NAA resource, and some of my older files apparently used this, I'd like to modernize those files. It's easy enough to fix (using 4.6.9): Just change any IPTC field and the data will be written correctly.

But how do I find which files need the help? It's not as simple as "everything before 2006," for example. Is there a "giveaway" field somewhere? Can EXIFtool or Lightroom help (LR can read the data)? I'm up for experiments if anyone has any ideas! Thanks.

[Kirk Baker]

Nancy,

Since PM5 no longer reads the IPTC-NAA resource, and some of my older files apparently used this, I'd like to modernize those files. It's easy enough to fix (using 4.6.9): Just change any IPTC field and the data will be written correctly.

But how do I find which files need the help? It's not as simple as "everything before 2006," for example. Is there a "giveaway" field somewhere? Can EXIFtool or Lightroom help (LR can read the data)? I'm up for experiments if anyone has any ideas! Thanks.

I don't think any modern applications besides PM 4.6.x and earlier can read IPTC-NAA resources.  Maybe older versions of Photoshop can.  IPTC-NAA resources are stored in the 'resource fork' of a file and are generally only represented on a Mac.  If you upload such a file to an FTP server for instance without putting the file in a package (MacBinary, Stuffit .sit file, etc.) it will be lost at the destination.

Are these files JPEGs, TIFFs, or PSDs?  If so then the same data will be in the IPTC record contained within the image file itself.  If they're old RAW files then you'd have to identify them.

The only way I know of to identify if a file has a resource fork is with a Terminal command.  And even then, it won't tell you if the resource fork contains an actual IPTC-NAA resource.

I don't know if ExifTool knows about IPTC-NAA resources.  It's a perl program (script) and is not likely to know about resource forks.

I'm not sure what else to give you as advice.

-Kirk

[nancyr]

Hi Kirk,

Thanks for the quick response! You guys are amazing.

Files in question are raw (.nef, probably all D1x, and as late as 2006), so I guess I'm out of luck. Maybe I can find a pattern if I play with a few, and save some extra backups. Most of these older files have a resource fork, but the forks with metadata are bigger, so there's a start. I suspect iView/Expression Media is to blame (I think it wrote to the resource fork), but who knows? I'll get all this data consolidated one day.

Thanks for the help.

[Hayo Baan]

Hi Nancy,

Apperently I was using the IPTC-NAA resource forks too.  Like you I like to keep everything tidy and in sync. Perhaps going a bit far, I therefore decided to actually delete the resource forks on my images altogether. Sure, like Kirk said, it may be that I removed more than just the IPTC-NAA stuff, but I figured that that couldn't hurt; any information therein should be rebuildable by the program that uses it. I mean, if you e.g. ingest your images or download them there's no resource fork either…

[Kevin M. Cox]

Sounds like this could be a cool feature for the Catalog Module.

"Convert IPTC-NAA metadata to IPTC4XMP" with options to remove or leave the IPTC-NAA resource after conversion.