Malformed non-Ascii characters in Exiftool output

[herb52]

System information:

• Windows OS version: Windows 10 - UI in German
• ImageGlass version: 8.3.11.21

To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. For a file (in my case a jpg image) that contains metadata with also e.g. chinese characters and/or also German umlaut characters, these non-Ascii characters are malformed in ExifTool output window
2. Starting Exiftool with option -lang de, also the German names of tags will contain German umlauts and these are also malformed.

Actual behavior:

In output of Exiftool these non-ascii characters are malformed:
e.g.: Location genau三山 hier
Remark: For test purposes I wrote 2 chinese characters into German text.

Expected behavior:

In given example output:
三山 should be 2 chinese characters: 三山

Screenshots:

Additional context:

[d2phap]

Can you send me a sample file?
Or can try adding this to Settings > Tools > Exif tool > Command arguments and see if it works

-charset exif=utf8

[herb52]

Hello,

thanks for your quick reply and also thanks for your great tool ImageGlass.
I answered with mail to your comment. Beeing not sure whether this was the correct way I repeat the mail here:

(1) -charset exif=utf8
As my testfile contains strings with non-ascii characters (and German umlauts) both in EXIF-tags and IPTC-tags (and of course in XMP-tags) I must use the Exiftool options -charset exif=utf8 and also -charset iptc=utf8.
Not using these options ExifTool will not send proper strings because it thinks the strings are Latin1 encoded.

As example I use tags: IPTC:keywords (it is a listtype-tag)
output with option -charset iptc=utf8:
Schlüssel三山wort1, Schlüssel三山wort2
output without this option:
Schlüssel三山wort1, Schlüssel三山wort2

(2) filename with non-ascii characters:
When I display all metadata of a file with a name containing non-ascii characters this name is displayed properly in ExifTool output - as FileName in File section.

(3) testfile
Can I send you this file via a private mail.

Thanks for your investigations in advance.
herb

[d2phap]

@herb52 you can send it to phap@imageglass.org

[fire-eggs]

One possible cause of the problem here is the command shell used to execute exiftool.

In ExifToolWrapper.cs, these lines:

       private (string stdOut, string stdErr) Open(string cmd) {
            var program = "\"%COMSPEC%\"";
            var args = "/c [command]";

Add the "/u" switch to args to get unicode output, as per "cmd /?":

/U      Causes the output of internal commands to a pipe or file to be Unicode

[herb52]

Hello,

thanks fire-eggs for your investigations. Yes, that could cause the problem.
I think it is better to start Exiftool directly, and not as "sub-command" of "cmd"

Best regards
herb52

[fire-eggs]

I've edited the metadata for the attached image (tumblr...zip) via Win10 properties.

Win10 Properties:

ImageGlass:

tumblr_e33b8463e398907306287dce8b5f2c9e_9f9ccd16_500.zip

[lifegpc]

Windows explorer (Windows 10)

I got same issue.
I find the exiftool output string with UTF-8. (My system default encoding is GB2312
The exif data in this image was added by exiv2 library (revelant code).
Image Description(Exif.Image.ImageDescription) was encoded with UTF-8;
XP Title, XP Comment, XP Author was encoded with UTF-16LE.

[herb52]

Hello,

can we have please a correction of this annoying error.
And sorry to say: ImageGlass is the only application (I know) that has problems to display the UTF-8 output of ExifTool properly

Best regards

[d2phap]

This issue is fixed in the latest build of ImageGlass Moon 8.7: https://imageglass.org/moon