This isn’t really a tip or trick, it’s an very annoying bug. I’ve found a problem, with the way Apple’s Aperture handles Swedish characters (ö, ä, and å) that might force me to start using another application. It’s really quite annoying because I love using Aperture and love my workflow in the application.
Basically I did a test and loaded some pictures into the picture bank of my new agency. There we discovered that all the Swedish characters written into the IPTC data become scrambled. You can see an example bellow of how things look on my system, and how they look when they pass into the web.
This first picture is from Aperture:
And this one is from my agency’s website:
I’m not sure exactly where the problem lies, I suspect that it happens when the pictures are pulled from the FTP and processed into the website. What ever application is reading them is scrambling the characters. Not sure if it’s the web applications fault or if it’s Apertures fault.
I’ve come to this conclusion because I’ve opened pictures in a wide variety of programs from Adobe Bridge to Photo Mechanic (which I might be switching to if I can’t resolve this) and the captions and keywords all come out fine. So I believe it’s not until the picture passes through the web that the problem occurs. After some googling I’ve discovered that WordPress also seems to warp Swedish characters, but it gives them an entirely different association that the one given when I load pictures into my agencies website. You can see an example bellow:
So I’m at a complete loss for how I can possibly resolve this problem. Maybe an AppleScript could be written to take a folder of exported pictures and make sure the proper Unicode denotation is applied to the IPTC data. Unfortunately that’s beyond my skill level.
Unless fix presents itself I might be forced to switch my entire workflow process, something I’m really not looking forward to especially considering how simple and quickly on can work in Aperture.