Hey everyone,
I'm an Aperture user and have discovered a bug that might force me to dump the application. I'm starting to shoot for a new agency and did a test to see that my IPTC metadata showed up correctly in their system.
Much to my horror I discovered that it doesn't and that the Swedish characters ö, ä, å are all turned into some different incorrect UniCode characters.
I'm desperately seeking advice on a solution. On the Apple support forums I found one thread with a poster experiencing my problem. If anyone has any advice I'd be very grateful, I fear this is going to force me to dump Aperture for another app and really don't want to do that.
If you don't have a solution and want to help, please report this problem to Apple:
http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html
I believe if they get enough people mentioning an issue they do address it, and it should be an easy fix for them.
Thanks in advance.
Mike
To specify I believe Aperture is encoding the characters in Mac Roman where it should be using Latin Scandinavian. For some reason on my system I see them correctly yet other systems don’t.
Hi,
I have had trouble with fonts with os 10.6.7 and have since downgraded to 10.6.6 and everything is working ok.
Dont know if this would work for you.
keef
keef
Mike,
Please explain exactly how you’re arriving at this problem, because I just tested and it works fine here. So either something is different on your end, or I’m misunderstanding what you’re doing. I just added all of these characters into the Caption field:
å ´áéíóú ˆâêîôû ø ¨äëïöü àèìòù
As you can see here: [screenshot]
And then exported and opened in Preview, and here the characters are all intact: [screenshot]
What am I missing?
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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Joseph,
I’m working for a new picture agency and the problem occurs when I upload pictures into their online web bank. I connect via an FTP and upload a folder of pictures, their web service then pulls them into the picture bank where our clients can search for and purchase pictures.
It is there that the Swedish characters become warped.
I did some research and discovered that other web services also have the same problem. If you export a picture from Aperture that includes these Swedish characters and upload it into a WordPress blog there too the characters will be warped.
I believe Aperture is using some loose designation for the encoding of the text, and various web services are making mistakes in interpreting it. I know Flickr also used to have problems with these characters in their EXIF data, but at some point they corrected it.
Michael,
So hold on… if the files are fine on export from Aperture, but get messed up on the upload, what makes you believe that it’s Aperture that’s at fault? Have you tried the same characters in a file output by, say, Photoshop?
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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Well I tried using a copy of Photo Mechanic, which is what a lot of the agency guys use and it works fine.
So it’s definitely a case of how the files coming from Aperture are encoded.
I also tested uploading images tagged and captioned with Photo Mechanic onto a WordPress site, and there too all the Swedish characters come out correctly with Aperture images they do not.
Another thing I noticed is that the same file gives you very different character scrambling depending on where I upload it. So it’s not like the IPTC data is been given a wrong designation but rather a generic one that everyone misinterprets in their own way.
You can see some examples of this on blog.
Michael,
Try taking a file exported from Aperture and open and save it from Photo Mechanic. Let’s see if going through there “cleans up” the encoding.
-Joseph @ApertureExpert
@PhotoJoseph
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Perhaps related, but I think there is indeed a problem and it’s not only related to your site or those specific ascii chars. If you look at the EXIF of my image, you can see that the copyright character gets turned into garbage too. I thought it was Flickr that had the issue, but upon checking out other EXIF data I can see that others do show the © character properly. [EXIF EXAMPLE]
This is an encoding issue for sure, and a known bug that folks have reported in the apple forums for years. Aperture itself generates the chars properly on a Mac, and are visible on a Mac, so looking at them in Preview doesn’t do anything to prove whether the export encoded the chars properly. A more appropriate test would be to take the same image, and look at it in Windows and see if the chars show up OK. I suspect you’ll see that there is corruption of the chars when you get to windows. My hunch is that Aperture is encoding in Mac Roman, and that’s causing some systems to foobar the conversion and end up using the wrong converters to decode the characters.
I don’t think there’s anything you can do about this except complain to Apple I’m afraid.
@Joseph - Passing Aperture images through Photo Mechanic doesn’t seem to do anything because Photo Mechanic maintains the current encoding, so it would only change if I rewrite all the captions. Otherwise Photo Mechanic maintains the incorrect data.
I think Robert has hit the nail on the head in his post. I’m also a Flickr user and I have noticed that the copyright symbol tends to be rendered incorrectly. I think a year or two back foreign character also rendered in correctly but Flickr has since corrected the problem on their end.
If anyone is reading this please take a minute to report this problem to Apple.
http://www.apple.com/feedback/aperture.html
This is a glaring omission, and as a photo journalists it quite unacceptable.