I'm resubmitting this post as I think the strange character causes
problems to the mailer. I don't know what the character is. It looks
like an upside-down cross. In the example below the non-printable
character has been denoted by X
Output of: echo X | od -c
0000000 342 200 240\n
0000004
Original post follows:
This is a strange one. I seem to have accumulated a bit of rubbish in
the Description field of some of my images. I'm not sure how I've done
it but it's a string of strange characters, i.e.:
(18 instances of X)
When I edit one of those images in f-spot there appears to be nothing in
the Description field. However by highlighting the field (click and
dragging the mouse over it) I can see a highlighted area corresponding
to the unwelcome characters. Then it's simple a case of hitting delete
and the problem's gone.
Doing all this in f-spot is a bit tedious as there's no way to delete or
modify the Description field for multiple files in the same was as for
tags. (This has come up on the list before but I can't find the link).
As I write all metadata to the files I decided to do this outside
f-spot. Using a bit of script and exiftool -UserComment= $fname I can
neatly remove the rubbish in the field. (exiftool seems to call the
Description field the UserComment field. This works ok except f-spot
must store the Description field internally somewhere in its database.
Fair enough. I exported a batch of files from f-spot, deleted them from
f-spot, then ran my script to nuke all the Descriptions. Tested on the
command line that they'd gone, and re-imported. But guess what, f-spot
still sees them, and when I use exiftool to view the metadata now that
the files are back in f-spot, the rubbish is back! I've experimented
with quitting and restarting f-spot after the export, removing from the
catalogue then physically deleting from drive, but the stuff still returns.
It's a bit fiddly to explain but the following code should help. My
clean files with deleted UserComment / Description field are in
~/renamejpegsout. They are re-imported back into f-spot, and the rubbish
characters re-appear. BTW, I checked that /jpegs/2010/09/19 was empty
before re-importing.
dou...@pheonix:~/renamejpegsout$ find . -type f -exec exiftool
-UserComment "{}" \; | sed 's/^.*: //' | grep X
dou...@pheonix:~/renamejpegsout$
dou...@pheonix:~/renamejpegsout$
dou...@pheonix:~/renamejpegsout$ cd /jpegs/2010/09/19
dou...@pheonix:/jpegs/2010/09/19$ find . -type f -exec exiftool
-UserComment "{}" \; | sed 's/^.*: //' | grep X
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
dou...@pheonix:/jpegs/2010/09/19$
Should I log this as a bug?
Dougie
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