EXIF, IPTC and XMP data imported inconsistently

Hi @sarapatricia,

NextGEN Gallery historically has supported title, caption and tags/keywords.

You can see a related article Here, it is from 2012 but still should be accurate.

I hope this helps.

Hi @jaimeimagely,

thanks for your reply – although it doesn’t really help because it doesn’t address the issue. I am NOT referring to title, caption and tags/keywords. I am referring to other EXIF, IPTC and XMP meta data like Copyright and Author. These have been supported by NGG since its beginning.

You can check which EXIF, IPTC and XMP meta data have been supported by NGG since Alex Rabe created it here:

/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/src/Legacy/lib/meta.php

Whether the issue is located in this file or any other I don’t know.

Hi @sarapatricia,

We officially support the aforementioned fields and those are used across the plugin. Some other data is used only in one or two “obscure” if you will, display options.

Even if the creator had support for it in the beginning, please do note NextGEN Gallery has changed hands several times since, I myself have been in the team for 5 years and I have been told we only support those 3 fields.

I will ask the team if we are expected to import all data regardless of what we use and let you know.

I will keep you posted.

Hi @sarapatricia,

Could you please let me know if you manually add the images meta or these are added by the camera itself?

I’ve just tested myself with NextGen Gallery 3.57 and all the EXIF and IPTC meta are consistently imported when I upload images.

For years I have been adding tags/keywords, Copyright and Author data with professional photography software to all my images which have been shot with different cameras. As I mentioned before all images have been treated the same.

Maybe we are not talking about the same actions that show these inconsistencies. There are 2 different actions.

1. Importing images or (re-)importing meta data. This seems to work OK and refers to title, caption and tags/keywords. So far so good.
2. Clicking on the “Meta” link that is shown under the thumbnail opens a window that ideally shows above mentioned meta data, EXIF data, IPTC data and XMP data. This is what doesn’t work consistently. I believe the EXIF, IPTC and XMP data are not being imported into the database, but read directly from the image file. Sorry, wrong wording on my end when I opened this issue. You can verify this by first clicking on the “Meta” link, look at the data shown, then rename the image file on OS level, click again on the “Meta” link and compare the output before and after renaming the image file. You’ll see that no EXIF, IPTC or XMP data will be displayed after renaming the image file.

If you rename the meta.php file to let’s say meta.php.SAV the “Meta” link will open an empty window. This makes me believe the issue is caused by this file:

/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/src/Legacy/lib/meta.php

Any further NGG action will lead to a fatal PHP error and crash WordPress. So rename it back to its original file name before continuing.

Hi @sarapatricia,

Thanks for your reply here. I think we are on the same page here.

So, when you click on the “Meta” link button, that’s basically either reading the images’ metadata from the database or it tries to read it from the image file itself in case that this data is missing within the database.

NextGen writes the metadata into the database once with the image uploading process.

Could you please try performing a test and upload the same image file to NGG a couple of times, then try noticing if clicking on meta will return identical or different results for each of them?

Hi @mihaiimagely,

So, when you click on the “Meta” link button, that’s basically either reading the images’ metadata from the database or it tries to read it from the image file itself in case that this data is missing within the database.

This is not quite correct. If everything goes well NGG will show 4 different kinds of data after clicking on the “Meta” link:

1. Meta data
2. EXIF data
3. IPTC data
4. XMP data

NGG only stores the first type of data in the database and reads the EXIF, IPTC and XMP data from the image file whenever you click on “Meta”. You can verify this by emptying the meta_data field in table wp1_ngg_pictures for a specific image file and clicking again on the “Meta” Link of that image.

Could you please try performing a test and upload the same image file to NGG a couple of times, then try noticing if clicking on meta will return identical or different results for each of them?

I used 2 different image files for this test and created multiple copies of them, e.g.

image1.jpg > image1a.jpg, image1b.jpg, image1c.jpg
image2.jpg > image2a.jpg, image2b.jpg, image2c.jpg

Each and every copy behaves exactly the same. Although all 6 files have the same meta data, the first set of copies does NOT show IPTC or Copyright data while the second set of copies does.

So the inconsistencies are always the same for a specific image file and this must be related to these image files. My point is that every other Image Manipulation Program does show ALL meta data correctly including EXIF, IPTC, XMP and it is only NGG that fails to do this in a consistent matter.

Hi @sarapatricia,

Could you please provide us with an example of 2 image files that contain the same metadata but that show different results after importing to NextGen Gallery?

We’d like to import those to our test site and inspect the results directly.

Thanks

Thanks for following up. Try these two images and let me know when you downloaded them so that I can delete them from the web.

https://1drv.ms/i/s!AldQ_cc2UwrGgxMW4PBUDW_Jl9oD

https://1drv.ms/i/s!AldQ_cc2UwrGgxJ163TGLSnb-83f

Hi @imagely, @mihaiimagely and @jaimeimagely, after a week of no feedback I dare asking are you working on this, is there any progress?

Another 4 weeks went by with no feedback and no solution, not even after several release upgrades to now NGG version 3.59.

I agree it is not good documentation and inconsistent seeming how they import metadata. You basically have to try every field and see what works for you. This shoudln’t be how NGG works. They need to have a checkbox where you can select the default metadata exports.