EXIF:UserComment Unicode byte-order bug

[osoviejo]

Vista Ultimate 64, fully updated and patched.

When you use Windows Explorer (Properties/Details) to edit the Comments
field of an image with EXIF metadata, the Unicode that is written to the
standard EXIF "User Comment" field is always little-endian, even if the
EXIF byte order specified by the image is big-endian.

This renders unusable any third-party app that handles EXIF metadata
correctly. The only exception I know of is exiftool, which has coded a
workaround.

Is there a patch available for this bug? If not, is anyone working on
it? Aware of it?

Michael Roper

 

[Miles Li [MSFT]]

Hello,

Thank you for your post.

Yes, this is a by-design behavior in Windows Vista. As EXIF spec is unclear
whether strings in UserComment should have endianness, it will writes EXIF
User Comments as Unicode in little-endian byte order, irrespective of the
byte ordering of the EXIF information. We follow the same behavior as
Photoshop. Our product team has tested to create bigendian files for
usercomment in both ASCII and Unicode with Photoshop, it doesn't change the
endianness of the UserComment field. We are not viewing this issue as a
bug. Thank you for your understanding.

I understand that it would be better if the UserComment field can be
changed if the endianness of the image is changed. I will forward your
comments to our developer group. Hopefully it can be modified soon.

In the future, if you have any further comments or suggestions regarding
Microsoft's products and services, I encourage you to offer the idea to the
following link:

https://support.microsoft.com/common/survey.aspx?scid=sw;en;1208&showpage=1&
ws=search

This is to let us know about your comments and requests regarding the
functionality and usefulness of our products and services. Your feedback
gives us an opportunity to address shortcomings and reinforce best
practices. When you send your comments/suggestions at this email address,
it goes to our product improvement group and they make recommendations for
new/enhanced features of our products and services.


Sincerely,
Miles Li

Microsoft Online Partner Support
Microsoft Global Technical Support Center

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