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johnrellis
Legend
April 28, 2015

P: JPEG format tripping up other programs

  • April 28, 2015
  • 63 replies
  • 1918 views

Lightroom CC writes JPEGs in an atypical layout that trips up other programs. While they appear to be strictly conforming to industry standards, the unusual layout has caused problems for at least two users: one who had problems uploading photos to real-estate services, and another whose own software tripped over the layout.

LR writes the APP1 header as: TIFF header, 114 unused bytes, ExifIFD, IFD1, IFD0. Whereas Photoshop CC uses a more traditional layout: TIFF header, no unused bytes, IFD0, ExifIFD, IFD1. Here's an Exiftool dump of the beginning of a LR JPEG:

And here's a dump of the beginning of a Photoshop JPEG:

I've tested LR JPEGs with 12 Mac and Windows programs and 2 online services, all of which read them just fine:

Mac: Preview, Photoshop CC 2014, ColorSync Utility, Firefox, Chrome, Lattice, Paintbrush, Safari, Word
Windows 8.1: File Explorer Preview, Irfanview, Paint, Windows Photo Viewer
Online services: Flickr, Zenfolio

Even though LR's JPEGs may be strictly conforming, if it wrote the JPEGs without the unused header bytes and it put IFD0 immediately after the TIFF header, as Photoshop does, then there would be fewer problems with other programs choking on LR's JPEGs.

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63 replies

Known Participant
April 28, 2015
I just did some testing: if I use an exported JPEG created by LR CC or PS CC 2014 (so ACR 9) then the metadata seems to work OK and is displayed in Google+ as it should be. However, if I use a publish service then it still fails to display the camera metadata.

So what gives? Bug with the publish services?
Known Participant
April 28, 2015
I've encountered the very same issue: I publish a photo to Picasaweb/Google+ and the metadata isn't displayed. Been doing this for years via LR and it's always worked perfectly - stopped working as soon as I started using LR CC.

No metadata displayed in other applications is a BIG issue for me. The bugs are stacking up...
johnrellis
Legend
April 28, 2015
Also, I seem to recall that years ago, LR 4 Beta had a similar issue, and the final release changed the layouts of JPEGs to be more traditional.