Metadata character set encoding 2.

[mastodon]

I am not familair with IMatch 5. I have filled IPTC fileds and not XMP for years, and now with IMatch 5 I wanted change for XMP.
So I imported all IPTC fields to XMP. Than I noticed that the charachter "ő" has changed into "?" in the IPTC field. Maybe I have done metadata write-back too... or else, actually I am learning IMatch now.
I saw the problem with polich charaters, so I set the IPTC character set to UTF-8 under Edit > Preferences >Metadata.
Would that handle all such problems with character coding? And it would be nice to have a warning, if IMatch find UTF charaters that could disappear if copied/moved.

[Mario]

You are giving a lot of info here. Let us break that down. What exactly did you do?

You imported your existing files into IMatch 5?

When you use the default settings, IMatch will import existing legacy (IIM) IPTC data, EXIF and GPS data into XMP.
All the data IMatch has extracted from your files can be viewed in the Metadata Panel, in the "Browser" layout.
When you look at the XMP data there, or the subset of XMP data shown in the "Default" Metadata Panel layout, do you see 'wrong' characters?

When importing legacy IPTC data into XMP, ExifTool looks for the UTF-8 tag in the IPTC record. If this tag is found, ExifTool assumes that the IPTC data in the file is in UTF-8 encoding (uses the UTF-8 character set) and imports it "as-is", because XMP is also UTF-8.

If no UTF-8 tag is found, ExifTool assumes that the IPTC data is encoding in the character set configured for the current user and performs a current character set => UTF8 conversion when importing the data into the XMP record.

In the rare case where you have IPTC data which is a) not UTF-8 and b) not in your current character set, you can tell IMatch which character set to use when importing the IPTC data into XMP: Edit > Preferences > Metadata.

Note: Having files with characters not from UTF-8 and not from the current character set is rare, but always trouble. Careful processing is required.

You can try these settings out by switching them, and then selecting a file and pressing <Shift>+<Ctrl>+<F5> and in that dialog "Reload Metadata". IMatch then reloads the metadata from the file, again importing IPTC/EXIF into XMP. But now the current character set is used.

More details can be found by typing character into the IMatch help index. Then click on Character Encoding > IPTC to open the corresponding help topic.