No keywords - garbage in caption

mbrady · July 14, 2007

I just uploaded a batch of photos here:
http://ruama.smugmug.com/gallery/3150342

The keywords are missing and the captions a few garbage characters appended. Actually a few pics do have captions, but those are the only ones that went through some manipulation in Photoshop first. Also, I edited a couple captions here in Smugmug to remove the extra chars, but decided to leave the rest pending further information.

The captions and keywords were added by Windows Photo Gallery. In there, it shows no differences in captions or keywords with photos that were tagged in there or tagged in other applications.

Any ideas? I'd hate to have to go back through and re-caption and re-tag everything locally. Plus I've tagged an unknown number of photos previously that have not been uploaded yet.

Thanks.
Matt

Andy · July 14, 2007

Hi Matt, it's because some of your filenames have names like this:

CIMG2047_B(cropped).jpg

don't use parens or any funny stuff in filenames. Alpha, 0-9, and _ are okay though.

mbrady · July 15, 2007

Would that affect every photo in the gallery? Causing all keywords for all photos to not be there? Only one photo in the album has "(cropped)" in it.
Each photo should have 4 or 5 keywords.

The garbage I'm seeing at the end of each caption is this:
ï¿½
(which in case doesn't show up correctly in the browser here in the forum is an "i" with two dots over it, an upside down question mark, and then a 1/2 symbol.
For example: http://www.ruama.com/gallery/3150342#172953845
(I manually edited out the garbage characters from the end of some of the photos, but it was on all of them at first).

mbrady · July 15, 2007

I've had some more time now to tinker with this. I deleted the photo that had "(cropped)" in the filename, but as I figured, it did not affect the other photos in that gallery.

Here's another example: http://www.ruama.com/gallery/3150342/2#172955039

In smugmug, it shows no keywords and the caption shows:
Devils Postpileï¿½

However, download the original and look at the tags. It has two keywords: Mammoth Lakes and Devils Postpile. The caption is "Devils Postpile" without the odd characters at the end.

mbrady · July 16, 2007

Any additional info on this?

mbrady · July 17, 2007

I hate to sound like a pest, but is this on anyone's radar at Smugmug? Andy's initial response was very speedy especially for a Saturday, but it's been a couple days now with no responses from anyone about my follow-up questions and examples.

Baldy · July 17, 2007

Hey Matt,

Sorry for the delay. I'm investigating and will let you know more when I get something.

Thanks,
Baldy

Andy · July 17, 2007

mbrady wrote:

The captions and keywords were added by Windows Photo Gallery.

Hmmm I bet this is the reason. I'm going to upgrade my Windows to Vista and test it out.

Stay tuned.

mbrady · July 17, 2007

Andy wrote:

Hmmm I bet this is the reason. I'm going to upgrade my Windows to Vista and test it out.

Stay tuned.

Thanks for the update.

Here's some more info in case it helps. I just tried looking at my originals with Adobe Bridge and the keywords seem normal in there. The caption looks ok too (although it's in the "Title" IPTC attribute rather than "Caption", but the garbage characters are not there). My star ratings were ok too.

Andy · July 17, 2007

mbrady wrote:

Thanks for the update.

Here's some more info in case it helps. I just tried looking at my originals with Adobe Bridge and the keywords seem normal in there. The caption looks ok too (although it's in the "Title" IPTC attribute rather than "Caption", but the garbage characters are not there). My star ratings were ok too.

OK I just upgraded to Vista. Please tell me exactly your steps how you captioned the photos. Don't leave a thing out

mbrady · July 18, 2007

Andy wrote:

OK I just upgraded to Vista. Please tell me exactly your steps how you captioned the photos. Don't leave a thing out

1. Plug in computer
2. Turn on computer..

ok, I'll leave out a couple easy steps!

Get a photo from your camera, do no other processing in anything. In Windows Photo Gallery, select the photo. In the bottom right corner, click the Add Caption option and type in some text. For the tags, click the Add Tags option near the upper right and type in the tag text. Doesn't seem to matter how many tags you add.
Then upload to smugmug.

Hopefully there's no weird issues with Windows Photo Gallery. I've found it to be surprisingly quick and easy to use and Photoshop doesn't seem to have a problems with the tags or captions. Plus I've tagged a bunch of other pics with it and I'm not really sure which ones they are, they're just mixed in with other stuff that I haven't uploaded yet, it would be a real bear to figure those out and re-tag with something else. Not to mention as Vista eventually spreads, more and more people will be using it.

Allen · July 18, 2007

mbrady wrote:

1. Plug in computer
2. Turn on computer.. ok, I'll leave out a couple easy steps!
...

You might have to expand on this, Andy's been using a MAC for quite a while now.

rofl

:hide

mbrady · July 23, 2007

Has anything come of this?

Andy · July 23, 2007

Allen wrote:

You might have to expand on this, Andy's been using a MAC for quite a while now.
rofl
:hide

Ah but I have an Intel Mac (we all do here at SmugMug) and I run Vista and XP on Parallels on my Mac

Andy · July 23, 2007

mbrady wrote:

Has anything come of this?

Tell me exactly where to put the caption, please?

microsoft_windows_vista_-_parallels_desktop-20070723-180728.jpg

mbrady · July 23, 2007

That's just the Windows explorer set to thumbnail view. What you're looking for is Windows Photo Gallery. It's installed as part of Vista.

It should look like this:

The caption is set in the lower right and the keywords in the column to the right of the thumbnails.

Andy · July 23, 2007

mbrady wrote:

That's just the Windows explorer set to thumbnail view. What you're looking for is Windows Photo Gallery. It's installed as part of Vista.

It should look like this:

The caption is set in the lower right and the keywords in the column to the right of the thumbnails.

Thanks. I just tried some photos, added captions and keywords and couldn't replicate the funky characters. Can you replicate this behavior 100% of the time?

mbrady · July 26, 2007

Andy wrote:

Thanks. I just tried some photos, added captions and keywords and couldn't replicate the funky characters. Can you replicate this behavior 100% of the time?

I did another test and actually have worse results than before for reason. Instead of missing keywords and garbage characters at the end of the caption, now I have missing keywords and the caption is missing entirely as well.

The new test is here:
http://www.ruama.com/gallery/2346402#177121372

I took the photo straight from the camera, added 2 keywords and a caption in Windows Photo Gallery and then uploaded using the drag-n-drop uploader.

The caption is missing and both keywords are missing.

Then I downloaded the original photo back to my computer from Smugmug and opened it in Photoshop. In there it does show both keywords and the caption. So the caption and keyword data is preserved in the original, but are not showing up when viewing in Smugmug.

mbrady · July 31, 2007

Here's some more info in case this helps. I opened the photo with Notepad to see if I could see any of the embedded information. Here's a small portion of it - I'm not exactly sure what all this means, but I do see my caption and keywords in there:

<?xpacket begin='ï»¿' id='W5M0MpCehiHzreSzNTczkc9d'?>
<xmp:xmpmeta xmlns:xmp="adobe:ns:meta/"><rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:Description rdf:about="uuid:faf5bdd5-ba3d-11da-ad31-d33d75182f1b" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><dc:title><rdf:Alt xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:li xml:lang="x-default">Test number three - with keywords</rdf:li></rdf:Alt>
            </dc:title></rdf:Description><rdf:Description xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"><dc:subject><rdf:Bag xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:li>Enoc</rdf:li><rdf:li>Mono Lake</rdf:li></rdf:Bag>
            </dc:subject></rdf:Description><rdf:Description xmlns:MicrosoftPhoto="http://ns.microsoft.com/photo/1.0"><MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordXMP><rdf:Bag xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"><rdf:li>Enoc</rdf:li><rdf:li>Mono Lake</rdf:li></rdf:Bag>
            </MicrosoftPhoto:LastKeywordXMP></rdf:Description></rdf:RDF></xmp:xmpmeta>
<?xpacket end='w'?>

You can see in there "Test number three - with keywords", that's the caption.
You can also see "Enoc" and "Mono Lake" in there. Those are the keywords. I don't really know what the reset of that stuff is.

mbrady · July 31, 2007

And this information from Microsoft explains how the Windows Photo Gallery program writes it's data to a file:
http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2006/08/16/702780.aspx

This paragraph appears to be the most relevant:

XMP is an extensible framework for embedding metadata in files that was developed by Adobe, and is the foundation for our “truth is in the file” goal. All metadata written to photos by Windows Vista will be written to XMP (always directly to the file itself, never to a ‘sidecar’ file). When reading metadata from photos on Windows Vista, we will first look for XMP metadata, but if we don’t find any, we’ll also look for legacy EXIF and IPTC metadata as well. If we find legacy metadata, we’ll write future changes back to both XMP and the legacy metadata blocks (to improve compatibility with legacy applications).

Matt

Andy · July 31, 2007

mbrady wrote:

And this information from Microsoft explains how the Windows Photo Gallery program writes it's data to a file:
http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/archive/2006/08/16/702780.aspx

This paragraph appears to be the most relevant:

Matt

Right - we use IPTC metadata, not XMP. That explains it.

mbrady · July 31, 2007

Andy wrote:

Right - we use IPTC metadata, not XMP. That explains it.

Are there any plans on expanding support to XMP data? After all, one of these days Vista will be very widespread and it comes with Windows Photo Gallery which a lot of people are going to use. It's probably the best photo gallery/organizer that Microsoft has ever released (which may or may not be saying much depending on your perspective

, but I was certainly surprised by it). All those people will be happily tagging and captioning away only to find out that the captions and keywords are gone when they upload here.

And it adds to the confusion (starting with mine originally!) when you open those same photos with Photoshop and the captions and keywords are right there in plain view just like the ones added directly in Photoshop. And vice-versa - Windows Photo Gallery sees all the old-style captopns and tags like normal. The random Joe on the street isn't going to know that there are more than one method of attaching data to a photo, he's just going to wonder why his two main photo tools see each others captions and keywords but not his favorite online photo website.

What's more mysterious is why my original batch of uploads do show the caption, but with the 3 garbage characters appended.

mbrady · July 31, 2007

I just ran across another oddity related to this:

Go to that test gallery: http://www.ruama.com/gallery/2346402

Switch the style to All Thumbs

Hover your mouse over the thumbnail.

The tooltip that pops up has the site name like normal, but also "test photo". Where did that come from? Normally it would show the caption for the photo, but it doesn't see the XMP caption in this case, and even if it did, that's not the caption! It's "Test number three - with keywords"

Matt

smeredith · August 13, 2007

I thought XMP was IPTC.

I'd also enjoy seeing this supported, as Vista file explorer and photo gallery is the way I add keywords and captions, and smugmug is not picking these up.

mbrady · August 15, 2007

Andy wrote:

Thanks. I just tried some photos, added captions and keywords and couldn't replicate the funky characters. Can you replicate this behavior 100% of the time?

How did your test work if XMP is not currently supported?

jbharold · October 29, 2007

mbrady wrote:

After all, one of these days Vista will be very widespread and it comes with Windows Photo Gallery which a lot of people are going to use.

For my first post on Digital Grin, I'll wholeheartedly agree with mbrady.

For better or for worse, Windows Gallery will become the default choice for a whole lot of people. You might as well support it now and be in the front of the pack.

If it helps, I've noticed that Photoshop Elements 6 seems to "fix" the metadata: once saved from PE, the tags created in Widows Gallery will be imported by SmugMug. I'd be happy to send a pair of exported .xmp files and you could diff/compare them and see exactly how PE reprocessed the data.

While you're at it, you could consider finding out how many of your first-born MS wants in order to include SmugMug as a built-in publishing option in Windows Live Gallery. Flickr is now there, as of the latest beta update.

BTW, I get the bad characters in the captions too... just one, after the final character I typed.

Thanks,
Jaime

jbharold · October 29, 2007

Andy wrote:

Thanks. I just tried some photos, added captions and keywords and couldn't replicate the funky characters. Can you replicate this behavior 100% of the time?

I see it very consistently. But I just did a quick test, and my funky characters do not show up on Safari. They do show up on Firefox 1.5 Mac (as a "?"), IE 7 Windows (as a box), and FireFox 2 Windows (as a diamond+"?"). Just in case you were uploading in Windows and viewing on the Mac...

Thanks,
Jaime

daboodah · November 24, 2007

Observations on uploading files tagged with Windows Live Photo Gallery (WLPG)
I have tested tagging from both XP and Vista using Windows Live Photo Gallery, and in both cases, it seems that the metadata does not get applied immediately to the files. I found that successful uploading of WLPG-created captions and keywords depended on the following:

The amount of elapsed time between tagging files in WLPG and uploading them to SmugMug: I found that waiting a few minutes seemed sufficient for a small number of local files, but if your photos are on a network share or you are tagging large quantities at once, you should probably wait longer.
The uploader being used: Only Send To SmugMug seems to translate the WLPG caption info properly for SmugMug. It appears that WLPG assigns caption info to the Title metadata field while SmugMug looks for caption info in the Description field. Send To SmugMug seems to make that translation for the user, so captions actually make it through to SmugMug (thank you Omar!). That being said, I did consistently get garbage appended to my captions when uploading from my Vista machine. Captions made it through perfectly on my XP machine when I used Send To Smugmug. None of the other uploaders were successful in transferring the WLPG captions to SmugMug.
The OS running on the source machine: As mentioned in 2 above, uploading from Vista machine using Send To SmugMug always resulted in garbage character being appended to end of my captions. I'm not sure why this is, but the Send To SmugMug developer might be able to explain it.

In summary, I have experienced success in uploading all metadata using Windows Live Photo Gallery and Send To SmugMug, but only if I didn't upload immediately after tagging the files. I have also seen some quirkiness in the translation of the caption info when uploading from Vista using Send To SmugMug. None of the other uploaders were successful in passing a WLPG caption to SmugMug.

Hope this can be helpful to someone.

--- One week later - UPDATE ---
Well now it suddenly seems that WLPG tags are NOT making it to SmugMug. Damn. This whole metadata thing is frustrating. Works great on my local machine, but don't count on SmugMug consistently picking up any metadata that is added using WLPG. XMP - the wave of the future, guys. Hope SmugMug can make this work in the future.

dzvisual · February 23, 2008

Me too
I'll add my voice to those wanting to see this work. I've just purchased a smugmug pro account and just assumed that my 6000+ photos tagged with XMP keywords would work properly in smugmug. It was a large effort to assign keywords but Windows Live Photo Gallery made the tagging almost tollerable. I found it easier to use for this purpose than Adobe Bridge. This all worked fine in flickr, but I switched to smugmug because of the obvious presentation differences. Anyway, I beg of the smugmug team - pleeeeease make this work. Did I mention please?

P.S. Other than this I'm a satisfied customer. Just will have to wait to upload the bulk of my photos until there is a solution to this.

mbrady · December 29, 2008

It's been a year and half since I first encountered this issue with XMP keywords and was hoping it would work now, but I tried again now and got the same results

Windows Live Photo Gallery has gotten some pretty significant upgrades over time and it's turned into quite a slick product with some nice keyword handling, but unfortunately it's basically off limits as far as Smugmug goes...

Is XMP support anywhere on the to-do list for the Smugmug team in the foreseeable future?

daboodah · January 2, 2009

mbrady wrote:

It's been a year and half since I first encountered this issue with XMP keywords and was hoping it would work now, but I tried again now and got the same results

Windows Live Photo Gallery has gotten some pretty significant upgrades over time and it's turned into quite a slick product with some nice keyword handling, but unfortunately it's basically off limits as far as Smugmug goes...

Is XMP support anywhere on the to-do list for the Smugmug team in the foreseeable future?

mbrady,

Have you tried using Send to SmugMug lately? It is a polished app now that has gone through several iterations of development. I posted earlier about some of the oddities I was seeing (similar to those you've described) using various SmugMug uploaders, but I have been uploading my pics to SmugMug using Send to SmugMug for quite awhile now without any problems with captions or keywords being lost or corrupted. I use it on my XP desktop as well as my Vista laptop without any problems.

Also, if you're not too afraid to try the Windows Live Photo Gallery beta, there is also a Publish to SmugMug that can be used directly from WLPG beta. I have tested Publish to SmugMug on my XP machine and it seemed to carry metadata across successfully as well.

No keywords - garbage in caption

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