P: JPEG format tripping up other programs

[johnrellis]

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.

[PCCounselor]

For the "Bugs in the LR 6.0.1 EXIF-Data" (here, I wrote about the problem: https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1835290) now we use "Jeffrey’s “Metadata Wrangler” Lightroom Plugin" as workaround - with these settings:



Link to Jeffrey: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-good...

[7obi07801]

I'm using 5.6.8 and since upgrade to LR6 my EXIFs are messed up on my site!

[7obi07801]

My website has started showing incomprehensible strings in EXIF data display fields since upgrade to LR6 too. Not cool! Any idea when this might be fixed???

[PCCounselor]

LR6 EXIF-Problem and Wikipedia:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T97253

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Co... (in German)

[PCCounselor]

Please see the last message above your entry

[7obi07801]

Thanks, I'll give it a go, but this is a workaround, not really a fix. Would be nice to hear something official and find out whether this was an intended change and if the problem lies with the PHP library reading the EXIF info or if this is indeed a bug in LR. Seems it could be either since Windows/Mac reads the data correctly.

[johnrellis]

It would be nice to get feedback from Adobe on this. However, I think it's best to avoid discussions about the meaning of the word "bug" and speculations on what was intended and focus on what LR's customers want.

As explained above, LR 6 strictly conforms with the industry standards, while PHP exif_read_data(), along with other applications, does not. As a practical matter, however, I think nearly all LR's customers expect LR to export JPEGs and TIFFs in a format that nearly all widely used software can read. Previous versions of LR met that expectation, but LR 6, in our opinion, does not. That is, while LR 6 conforms with the de jure standards, it does not conform with de facto practice.

The more evidence we can collect on that point (by having people come here to vote and add details of their experience), the more likely that Adobe will prioritize the issue.

[Fondaphotos]

I have the same problem with LR6. When I import JPGs to WordPress, camera EXIF field is missing in the Wordpress Library

[Fondaphotos]

It works for me but I made a small change. I had to preserve all the Date/Time fields otherwise I could not display this information in WordPress.
Great plugin!

[johnrellis]

Some newly discovered details: LR 6 makes three passes to export a file: 1) It writes the file, including with full metadata. 2) It reads the file back into memory. 3) It rewrites the file with updates to face-detection region information. Past versions of LR only used one pass, as does nearly every other program.

The .jpg written on the first pass uses the typical EXIF IFD layout. But the re-written file from the third pass uses the atypical layout. I'd wager the second two passes were introduced to support face recognition, since it's the face region information that's getting changed on the third pass. I'd guess an inexperienced programmer couldn't figure out how to change the existing code to write all metadata on the one and only pass, or he/she was pressured to hack something quickly, so he/she added additional passes (with bugs to boot).

See this post for more details than you want: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Also having this problem... disappointing.

[Fondaphotos]

Use the Metadata Wrangler, it works very well. It takes a bit of time to install bu then you can save parameters as a preset and it becomes completely transparent.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Same problem here. Re-saving file in Photoshop fixes the EXIF data but it shouldn't have to be that way.

Hope this gets fixed soon!

[johnrellis]

A workaround is to set the export option Limit File Size To to be a very high number, e.g. 30000 K (30 MB). This was suggested by an Adobe employee in another bug report that might have the same cause as this issue:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

I've tried a couple of exports and it seems to work.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Yep, it does work. Thanks for this workaround John.

[johnrellis]

This bug still exists in LR CC 2015.1.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Many people having this issue are on PHP-based servers. Just an FYI, this issue has been reported as a bug on the PHP side of things, as well.

http://news.php.net/php.bugs/193576

Hopefully, someone somewhere can get this fixed before I have to write my own EXIF-parser. 🙂

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

I've upgraded to LRCC and exported pictures do not show EXIF data Picasa version 3.9.139. Bit of a pain so pleased I didn't uninstall LR5.

[juke99]

Same here. Fortunately the workaround that John R. Ellis describes works with Picasa too.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Any updates to this issue? This is infuriating that it wasn't fixed in 2015.1. This worked fine in 5.x and 4.x

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

30000k fix worked for me too.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

Now there are thousands of pictures on Flickr and Wikimedia sites all with a few fields of malformed metadata. It seems both Adobe and the PHP community, whomever is responsible, have little interest in addressing this.

[johnrellis]

This problem appears to be fixed in LR 6.1.1 / CC 2015.1.1.

[FeedbackCommunityMember]

With Lightroom 6.1.1. and Wordpress 4.2.4 / Media Library Assistant 2.13 all Data are in place.

[Malone545]

Just my 2 cents...

I tried to export jpeg's from Lightroom CC/2015.1.1 to load onto my Playstation 4 and the jpeg's were not viewable.

After reading this thread, I exported jpeg's from Photoshop CC, and my Playstation 4 was able to display them properly.