2010.06.12 07:36 "[Tiff] libtiff and IPTC tag", by Andreas Kleinert
Hi all,
I'm using libtiff 3.9.2. in SView5 (.NET version) - in parallel, for some special cases, I've got some additional custom TIFF parser included in the same codebase.
I've encountered again a TIFF image where libtiff gives the following error/warning (i.e. debug log output):
<long filename>: wrong data type 7 for "RichTIFFIPTC"; tag ignored
I would expect, that libtiff handles that case gracefully, i.e. under
http://www.awaresystems.be/imaging/tiff/tifftags/iptc.html (greetings to Joris van Damme - whenever I google for some
tifftag, this is one of the first page hits... ;-)
it is written for that tag
Type UNDEFINED or BYTE
and there even is a statement included
Often times, the datatype is incorrectly specified as LONG.
A required tag type fix from BYTE (1) to UNDEFINED (7) should not be a reason to reject this tag, IMHO (I have some doubts regarding interchangeability with LONG, but that is type 4, and as long as we just read bytes, there won't occur any endianess isssue for sure).
However in tif_dirinfo.c within TIFFFieldInfo it is defined that libtiff expects LONG for TIFFTAG_RICHTIFFIPTC (custom field)...
Other descriptions of this issue (via Google): http://www.imagemagick.org/discourse-server/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=12872
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Picasa/thread?tid=43cace71df6d6150&hl=en http://forums.cgsociety.org/archive/index.php/t-769395.html
There also were some statements found, that the original RichTIFF spec defined it as BYTE.
***
For now I'll add a workaround using my internal parser.
For the future it would be good to either have libtiff being more error tolerant, or having some kind of "strict" vs. "sloppy" parsing (maybe there is such switch yet, and I overlooked it).
***
Sample image can be provided by email if needed.
Best Regards,
Andreas
--
Dipl.-Ing. Andreas Kleinert VDI (Andreas_Kleinert@ieee.org) Embedded Systems Software Consultant
PGP Key: http://pgp.mit.edu/ -- Search: "Andreas Kleinert"