I've been doing a lot of work to ensure accurate metadata on my photo collection due to issues with various tools I've used over the years and the various metadata standards.
To this end I've been using only Directory Opus to make the latest updates and have noted that when it updates tag metadata it appears to leave a spurious null at the end. This causes some of my other tools to consider a tag or file different when it shouldn't be.
For example Beyond Compare shows this:
I appreciate there is a lot of variation in how various EXIF/IPTC metadata is formatted but is this intentional as edits with Photoshop Organiser and a couple of older EXIF editors doesn't do the same?
From a quick look, this is how the image metadata library we use works with IPTC tag strings.
I'm not completely sure what the IPTC spec says, as I'm struggling to find a proper description of it at a binary level. But the library we use is fairly popular so I imagine most tools cope with the null being there or not. Semantically, the tags are the same, even if not identical at the binary level Beyond Compare is showing in the screenshot.
It's something we could probably change, but I'd want to understand it more first, in case there is a compatibility reason it works the way it does.
