XnView Software

I am using the current version of XnViewMP 0.51 on Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04. In the first step I added keywords to JPEG files running XnViewMP on Windows. When I switched to Ubuntu I noticed that those keywords containing an ß do not show the character but the rest of the word.

Do you use utf8 IPTC?

No. On Windows where I wrote the tags UTF-8 encoding was disabled. I am not sure if it is the default setting or might have been set from an older configuration file which sits in the folder. Normally I just overwrite all files to keep the configuration.

Thank you for the suggestion. When I rewrite the tag explicitly retyping the character and overwritting the tag it also shows up correctly on Ubuntu.

1. How can I get rid of the keyword entry under Windows which is still contained in the list and might be the one which is not UTF-8?
2. What would you recommend I can do to replace the non-UTF-8-written tags with their correct counterparts? I have multiple folders, multipe tags, multi-selection. I do not want to loose other IPTC information set on the pictures.

aussenboarder wrote:2. What would you recommend I can do to replace the non-UTF-8-written tags with their correct counterparts? I have multiple folders, multipe tags, multi-selection. I do not want to loose other IPTC information set on the pictures.

You could ask/check http://u88.n24.queensu.ca/exiftool/forum/ (exiftool is the tool used by xnviewmp to read and write tags). Phil Harvey is very responsive.

Thank you, mahikeulbody. The forum of exiftool, however, is actually offline as it seems.

Feature request:
It would be nice if XnView would include an option to show whether keywords have been written using UTF-8 encoding or something else. This criterion should also be available as a filter and as a search parameter.

I posted my problem on the ExifTool forum (which is back online obviously).

Nevertheless, I would like to know if I need to remove the keyword entry from the list in the IPTC settings dialog in case it already stored the non-UTF-8 encoding?

If you use multiple OS, the better is to use UTF8 in IPTC, or you can configure in XnViewMP the charset used for IPTC

aussenboarder wrote:Feature request:
It would be nice if XnView would include an option to show whether keywords have been written using UTF-8 encoding or something else. This criterion should also be available as a filter and as a search parameter.

Some tag editors don't write the charset used to write IPTC tags. In this case there is no simple way for another tag editor to guess the charset of the IPTC fields.

You can also check the Exiftool FAQ, item 10 (IPTC alinea) http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/faq.html

I would like to insist on the fact we are talking about IPTC-IIM (the old IPTC standard), not the current IPTC standard which uses UTF only.

As I said in another post in the past, I think it could be a safe idea to rename IPTC to IPTC-IIM into XnViewMP.

ok, i'll use IPTC-IIM

Cool !

IPTC is the name of the organisation which standardize Photo Metadata.
IPTC-IIM was the name of their previous standard, based on a data structure from the IPTC organisation.
IPTC-Core, IPTC-Extension are the names of their current standards, based on a data structure created by Adobe (XMP, which is defined in XML).

Since XMP is based on XML, it is extensible and many organisations/companies, including IPTC organisation, added their tags within new name spaces (of course the first name spaces were added by Adobe, the creator of XMP metada structure). This way if one want to tag photos according to IPTC (the organisation) he has to choice between IPTC-IIM and XMP and, in the XMP case, he has to know which XMP tags are included into the IPTC standard.

=> an ideal tag editor should help him
- offering a clear choice between IPTC-IIM tagging or XMP tagging (idem for displaying existing tags)
- in case of XMP tagging, showing separately each name space (ideally with the possibility to identify or to filter only IPTC name spaces)