Metadata update does not stick

[vlouekari]

Hello
I work a lot with keywords. After adding keywords I update metadata and the yellow pencil disappears just like it should. But after couple of seconds the yellow pencil appears again and I can see that the updating process has actually undone my keyword changes. So often I have to run update several time before the new keywords stick. This is very bad because I rely heavily on keywords.

Yours

[Mario]

This is not uncommon and is usually caused by keywords which are out-of-sync between legacy IPTC, flat and hierarchical XMP keywords in your files.
Problems with metadata often shows up in IMatch, because IMatch really cares and tries to create rich, standardized and complete metadata.

This may also depend on the keyword mapping settings you have chosen in IMatch, the contents of your thesaurus etc.

This has been reported, analyzed in detail and solved many times. Search the community for details, for example, search for pencil

https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?action=search2

In short: If writing back two times gets your metadata fixed and your keywords in sync, all is well..

Else,

a) Provide sample images which exhibit this behavior (this allows us to tell which metadata is the problem)
b) Provide screen shots of Edit > Preferences > Metadata and E > P  > Metadata 2 so we can see which settings have been enabled.

[mastodon]

I have this problem, for years. I can not over it.
Once I had this problem (years ago): Most of but not every accent characters was (in IMatch) replaced by "?" or special character string (ex. "á" with "á", "é" "é"). Before IMatch I used IrfanView for tagging.
I changed the ? or the string with the respective accent character, save it. After that it was all right in most cases. But sometime it changes back. I could not find out in what circumstances.
How can I get rid of this?
A attached some example files.

[Mario]

Non-ASCII character are always a problem if you have to deal with legacy IPTC information or EXIF. IPTC has a so-so support for code pages, and EXIF virtually has none.
If you write non-ASCII characters (as you mention in your post) and your files also contain legacy IPTC or EXIF data, trouble is almost inevitable.

XMP has no problems with non-ASCII characters of course.

The effects you see may depend on many circumstances, from the code page your system runs, which applications you use (I have no idea if IrfanView is even aware of code pages, character set conversion rules, IPTC and EXIF character encodings etc. which character set it uses, if it sets the legacy IPTC and EXIF character set encodings correctly etc.).
Using more than one application in this case will make your problems worse. And by what you explain in your post, you do.

Looking at your files, the problem is caused by you using non-ASCII characters with both legacy IPTC and EXIF metadata. Neither is really designed to work with non-ASCII characters and this will cause issue when mapping between XMP and EXIF / legacy IPTC. While IPTC can theoretically manage UNICODE, EXIF cannot.

You can overcome this will telling IMatch (ExifTool) which code page to use for converting between legacy IPTC, EXIF and XMP. But that may have cause other issues downstream your workflow.

Critical is  the XMP description (which must be mapped to EXIF:UserComment and IPTC:captionAbstract). The XMP can handle non-ASCII, no problem. But when mapping your data to legacy IPTC/EXIF, the UTF-8 character set used by XMP must be converted to ASCII and an assumed code page. This is explained in the IMatch help.

I either recommend a) deleting the legacy IPTC and EXIF data in your files or b) disabling metadata working group compliance or c) not using the XMP description tag or d) setting the code pages depending on your local language under Edit > Preferences > Metadata. See help for details. Note that other applications may break your metadata again unless they are aware of these changes.

Combining characters which cannot be directly stored in EXIF/IPTC (or at least not without assuming a certain code page) will give you problems when IMatch maps XMP data back to IPTC and EXIF.

[mastodon]

Ok. I know, that Irfanview had made this problem. Irfan had repaired it, but I tagged this files before the patch.
OK. Thanks, I try it!

[Mario]

See my post above. After looking at your files, my assumptions about character set / code page issues where correct.

Mixing legacy metadata like IPTC and XMP with non-ASCII characters and Metadata Working Group compliance can be challenging. IMatch offers the tools to deal with your problems. See the help for details.

[mastodon]

I found, if I remove face tags AND keywords (made from face tags), the file does not have problem, pencil disappiers. But if I make face tags even with IMatch, the pencil always reappiers. List of tags to write: IPTC::ApplicationRecord\Keywords.
Would be the removal of all IPTC tags a solution in that case? How can I do that, without removing anything else? I don't realy use Exiftool.

[Mario]

This is most likely caused by a mismatch of legacy IPTC keywords, XMP flat and hierarchical keywords in combination with your mapping and metadata settings.
Deleting the IPTC keywords would probably be the solution, because this allows IMatch to rewrite them from what is in XMP and thus properly synchronize them.

There is a preset to delete legacy IPTC data in the ExifTool command processor: "Delete legacy IPTC (IIM) metadata".
If you are sure that only the IPTC keywords are the problem, you can also delete the keywords only with

-iptc:keywords=

instead of

-iptc:all=

[mastodon]

I had removed all IPTC tags with Exiftool command processor: "Delete legacy IPTC (IIM) metadata", but the problem remains. So, I removed the corresponding keywords in the Metadata panel, too.
After this, all metadata seam to be good, rescan and no pencil!
Thank you, Mario!!!!

(Sometimes, it only works, if I first remove the corresponding keywords in the Metadata panel.)

[Mario]

Did you check that the problem was not caused by the flat XMP keywords (if they don't match the hierarchical keywords, problems may happen).
Only you can tell, unless you provide a sample image with full metadata intact for analysis.