Problem with international (UTF-8) IPTC tags

A
Posted By
alsbergt
Sep 9, 2006
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1387
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(Shamelessly copied from my question in Adobe Forums)

I am sorry for repeating a question asked a week ago. I thought that phrasing the subject as a question would help attract answers…

I experience the following problem with Photoshop CS2 (version 9.0.1) on Windows XP:

If I have JPEG files with IPTC tags in UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding, containing a tag (e.g. Caption/Description) with non-English characters (e.g. umlauts or European accents), when opening that file in Photoshop, looking in the File Info dialogue, those tags are read as ISO-8859-1 encoded (although the CharacterSet/1:090 IPTC attribute is properly set to hexadecimal 1b 25 47 to indicate that the other tags are in UTF-8 ).

This means, that all non-English characters in such files are decoded as some arbitrary two characters. For example, the word "Café" is turned to "Café".

Saving the file from Photoshop will then remove the CharacterSet attribute from the file, so it will further on be read by other software also as ISO-8859-1, with the non-English characters ruined.

Furthermore, if a file is created in Photoshop CS2, and fill through the File Info menu, tags with non-English characters, they are saved in ISO-8859-1 encoding, even if they contain non Latin-1 characters (which cannot be encoded in this encoding) – in this case they are replaced by different characters. For example, entering a caption of "Café", will result in Café written as ISO-8859-1. Entering "Paweł", will result in "Pawel" being written (note the ‘ł’ turning into an ‘l’).

Admittedly, the full information is stored in the XMP tags when saving such files (although it is not read correctly when opening files with only IPTC tags in UTF-8, so in such a case information is lost), so if I entered the tags through Photoshop, I will have them available next time. However, when opening the files through other software which does not support XMP, the IPTC information is used, which contains the "bad" tags.

I need the IPTC information in the files – the XMP information is useful for what supports it, but I depend on some software, which like most programs today, still supports only IPTC and Exif, not XMP. The current behvaiour I observe with Photoshop inhibits me from using non-English characters with it.

The correct behaviour should be – when opening files with IPTC tags, read them in the encoding indicated in the file. When saving files, use any encoding that is capable of representing all the characters used. If only English characters are used, ASCII or ISO-8859-1 is OK, but if non-Latin-1 characters are used, the text should be written in Unicode.

Can anybody suggest some solutions to get Photoshop to interoperate with other software with non-English IPTC tags?

Best regards, any help appreciated,
— Tom

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