I have uploaded several images to an album, all of which have both the EXIF Copyright and the IPTC Copyright Notice fields filled in. The metadata read by ZenPhoto includes the artist name, but the copyright field is empty.

Where, if not from those two fields, does ZenPhoto look for the copyright?

Interestingly, in the database, the EXIFCopyright and IPTCCopyright fields are blank for these images, but Null for other images uploaded where that data wasn't in the file.

Further digging reveals that if I replace the © character in the EXIF/IPTC data with (c) instead, it works - there seems to be an issue processing that character when reading the data. I had set the default IPTC encoding to UTF-8, but that didn't seem to do it (and presumably affects only IPTC, not EXIF).

Any thoughts? For now I can just use (c) instead, but perhaps this is a bug...

If you are using Adobe products to add the meta data they do not use UTF-8 for some unknown reason. Try a forum search that had been topic before.

I'm actually not using Adobe, I'm using ACDSee Pro 3 - but I don't know fur sure what encoding it uses. Still, even if it was an encoding issue, wouldn't I get an incorrect character instead of a truncation? I searched for relevant posts, but the closest ones I came up with were problems with Chinese characters in 1.3 and truncation after "Educational Quotes" pasted from Word.

Sorry, I can't answer that. I will pass that to my collegue sbillard who is more familiar with the exif stuff.

Ok, thanks. I didn't want to put it in the tracker as a bug if it was "expected behavior" or a known bug, or if it was something I was doing incorrectly on my end. Thanks for the fast responses! Let me know if there's any more information either of you need, I'm happy to help out iin any way I can.

This is most likely caused by whatever software you are using "lying" about the character set it is storing in these fields. There is an option to "force" zenphoto to assume a particular character set if it is not specified. But if it is simply specified wrong, there is not anything we can do.

The reason you are getting a blank entry is that MySQL will abort the string when it encounters a character which is invalid. You should also check your database to be sure all the character encodings are set correctly on all the fields.

Thanks for that info. I don't know what encoding is "actually" used in the file - I'll look around for some type of EXIF/IPTC metadata tool that might show it, or switch back to the copyright symbol and use a hex editor to check it. The MySQL table does use UTF8 encoding, so it shouldn't reject any incoming data, I think.

MySQL will reject ANY character that is not part ot the UTF-8 character set. So if you have, for instance, an ansi copyright symbol masquerading as UTF-8 it will cause a problem.