[Digikam-devel] Encoding for IPTC comments

[Leonid Zeitlin]

Hello, Digikam developers,
I am a active and happy user of Digikam. One feature I like and use is
ability to save image comments to EXIF and IPTC tags. This way image
comments entered in Digikam are also usable in other applications I use
under Windows, e.g. Google Picasa, IrfanView or ACDSee. Unfortunately, I
face a problem when comments are not in English. I am a Russian speaker and
naturally want to annotate my pictures in Russian. However, Digikam will
only save ASCII characters as IPTC comment. It may be in line with IPTC
standard (although I'm not sure, as far as I can see the standard says that
caption consists of "graphic characters" where "graphic characters" are
defined as "characters that have visual representation") - but in any case
Picasa or ACDSee happily read and write non-ASCII characters in IPTC
caption. These Windows applications of course use Windows character set,
CP1251 in my case, which Digikam won't read. In the end, no
interoperability between Digikam and Windows world in terms of Russian
image captions.

I understand and share the concern about following the IPTC standard, but
interoperability with popular image manipulation programs is equally
important for me, plus I don't really see IPTC insisting on ASCII.

To help my problem I have come up with small patches for Digikam and
kipi-plugins, which I would like to offer to Digikam community for review
and comment. This is what they do:
1. Add an option in Configure Digikam dialog, Metadata page, "IPTC
Encoding". By default it is ASCII and Digikam's current behavior is
preserved.
2. If the option is set to a non-ASCII encoding, Digikam will read and write
IPTC tags in this encoding. Metadataedit KIPI plugin will do the same.
3. The setting is stored in kdeglobals (rather than digikamrc), since it's
used not only by Digikam itself, but also by Digikam kioslaves and any
applications that would load Metadataedit KIPI plugin.

The patches are made against Digikam 0.9.0 and kipi-plugins 0.1.3 sources.

I welcome any feedback about my patches and hope to see them in Digikam one
day.

Thanks,
  Leonid
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