GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 438716
IPTC comments are not seen by Picasa
Last modified: 2007-05-25 20:42:18 UTC
Picasa gets confused when IPTC data contains the "version" and "encoding" data sets. gthumb currently sets these tags whenever IPTC data is saved in an image. By removing them, Picasa will happily import captions saved by gthumb.
Created attachment 88248 [details] [review] Proposed patch This patch removes the call to iptc_data_set_version() and iptc_data_set_encoding_utf8() that cause the problem. Although the resulting IPTC data is slightly less compliant with the IPTC spec -- no other applications seem to make use of these fields. In fact, some applications, like Picasa, get confused by them. Note that full Picasa compatibility also requires at least version 1.0.2 of libiptcdata in addition to this patch.
Hmm. Shouldn't this be fixed in Picasa, rather than breaking gThumb? What happens if the comments have unicode characters in them, if the patch is applied? Do they come out garbled (i.e., interpreted as ASCII)? - Mike
This patch does not change how the text is actually encoded. It has always been UTF-8 and will stay that way. gthumb will continue to be able to read and store comments, etc. correctly in UTF-8. The only change is that there will no longer be an additional field that indicates that the comments are stored in UTF-8. I have never found another application that actually uses this field, so removing it should cause no harm. (If you know of an application that uses it, please let me know). There are a lot of aspects of the IPTC standard that are universally ignored ever since Adobe co-opted it for its own use many years ago. This seems to be one of them.
OK, patch committed (gthumb-2-10, trunk, and metadata-ideas branches, svn rev 1681-1683). We'll see if it fixes more things than it breaks... - Mike
Thanks. -David