Missing IPTC information

[PeterTaylor]

Hello all,


This is my first question/problem with Lightroom 2 Beta. I have had a quick look but have not been able to find an answer to my problem, which is getting Lightroom to successfully read the IPTC information from a jpg image.


Please let me try to explain in more detail, I am a Motorsport photographer and I normally use iView/Expression Media 1 or 2 to sort, caption and catalogue my images and I use Photoshop CS2 or CS3 for doing any image editing and cropping.



As I had a free weekend I decided to give Lightroom a try. I created 4 different catalogues one each for two recent events, one for the whole of my E: Drive and one of my NAS Box. I noticed that some of the images where not showing caption information in the IPTC fields. This was the same if the image was in one or more different catalogue. I know the information is in the file because I can see it with Photoshop CS3 or NikonView. I have tried read metadata from file, I have tried synchronizing folder. On one of the smaller single event catalogues I have even tried rewriting the information out to the files using iView 3.1, Expression Media 1 and Expression Media 2 that’s three different versions of the same application and then recreating the Lightroom catalogue each time. Each time the IPTC fields were view able in NikonView and Photoshop CS3.


Any ideas please.

Peter

 

[Brad Snyder]

Peter, just wanted to say Welcome to LR Forums.

I really can't contribute anything to your problem, because my workflow is different enough that I haven't seen anything like this before.

We do have some folks who are quite knowledgable and experienced in this arena, I'm hopeful they'll have a solution for you, shortly.

 

[Mark Sirota]

I can't explain this off the top of my head.

Some questions: Do these same images have problems in any of the four catalogs, or just one of them? If you import one of the "problem" images into another catalog, does it have the same problem in the new catalog? That is -- is the problem per-catalog, per-image, or not that predictable?

Could you try using a metadata viewer like exiftool, or Jeffrey Friedl's metadata viewer, and see whether there appears to be any difference between the "good" images and the "bad" ones? Or, could you post one of the "bad" files for others to examine?

 

[PeterTaylor]

Hello,
The same images have problems no matter which of the catalogs they are in. I have tried exiftool to look at few of the problem images. This sees the information as does NikonView etc. For example Caption-Abstract - 2''8 British Touring Car Championship.Thruxton Circuit, Hampshire, UK. 17th-18th May 2''8..(43) - Chris Stockton (GBR) - BTC Racing Seat Toledo Cupra .World Copyright: Peter Taylor/PSP . Which is correct apart from the odd missed space. If I use exiftool to make a small edit such as add a carriage return at the end of the text and then get exiftool to save the changes back to the image and then update the metadata in Lightroom, Lightroom sees information in the caption field.

 

[Mark Sirota]

Interesting... If you make that small change to the caption with Exiftool, does Lightroom then only see the caption, or does it see all of the missing metadata? (Or was the caption the only missing item?)

 

[PeterTaylor]

Hi Mark


It is the following fields caption, location, city, state/province, and country that are missing. I have done a quick check using NikonView to edit these fields and check what happens in lightroom. If I alter any of the following field’s location, city, state/province, and country nothing happens when I try a medadata refresh. If I alter the caption field then all these fields are updated in lightroom when I do a medadata refresh.

Peter

 

[PeterTaylor]

I have also found that when lightroom reads the IPTC information from these files, the formatting i.e. the carriage returns are not showing instead they show as a small square. If I then delete these and put in the carriage returns, when these files are opened in Photoshop and the file information is examined I seem to be getting a double carriage return as I now see a blank line between the lines of text.

 

[Mark Sirota]

Hmm, that sounds like a bug to me (that you need to change the caption in order for new location metadata to be noticed). I would strongly suggest writing that up, including detailed steps for reproducing the problem, and submit it to Adobe.

Please also post the precise steps to recreate it here. Perhaps we can figure out what's going on, or come up with a workaround, once we see it in action.

The carriage return issue sounds like a separate issue. You might write that one up too, but keep it separate from the first.

 

[Sean McCormack]

Em, location refresh has been buggy for ages Mark.