Nikon D7000 Aperture not importing copyright, image comments

Hudson_Ferris wrote:
Just got a D7000. Added image comment and copyright information. Imported photos. Aperture did not import copyright or image comment. Is Aperture capable of grabbing this info? If so, what do I have to do to make it happen.

Thanks

Are the copyright and comments added when you import in Aperture or did you set them in the camera?
If in the camera are they missing from both RAW and JPG images or both?

Having the same problem (Nikon D300s, shooting in NEF, with Aperture 3.1.2)

The problem seems to stem from a buggy/peculiar way that A3 handles copyright info. Copyright info can be written in a field in EXIF and as a field in IPTC. Futhermore, in EXIF it is embedded in the NEF, and IPTC can also be embedded in the NEF, or appear in embedded XMP in the NEF, or as a XMP sidecar. So there are many possibilities, leading to 'incorrect' handling.

The camera writes Copyright info as EXIF. If one imports to Aperture, without any other metadata handling of the NEF files, then the EXIF info is ignored by Aperture. (At least for NIKON D300s files, and perhaps D7000 as the original poster complains).

If one edits the IPTC metadata of the NEF with PhotoMechanic before Aperture import, then Aperture will use the EXIF copyright info and not the IPTC info that was written with PhotoMechanic. If any of the NEF files do not have copyright info in EXIF (ie. with some shots one turned off the in-camera copyright option), then Aperture will correctly display the IPTC data entered in PhotoMechanic. (So for Aperture EXIF trumps IPTC once IPTC is written?)

Finally, if one edits the IPTC copyright metadata on import, then Aperture will display this, but this is only in the aperture database until one chooses 'Write Metadata to Master', which will update the master NEF with the IPTC data entered in Aperture. But at the time Metadata is updated, Aperture (in a way) 'damages' the original NEF file since it will show a new 'Created' date and time that will reflect the metadata write and not the moment the image was created in camera, so viewing referenced master NEF files by date in the finder will not appear in chronological sequence.

So aperture still has some bugs with metadata handling.
1. Non recognition of EXIF copyright data when no other IPTC data exists.
2. Peculiar handling of metadata when both EXIF and IPTC data is present (uses EXIF instead of IPTC)
3. Apparently creates a new NEF in the finder when chossing 'Write Metadata to Master'

A possible explanation is that a Copyright Status field is set to FALSE despite the camera having writing EXIF copyright info -then the problem would lie with the cameras software. But upon viewing the In that case, aperture would not look for copyright info on import. But if one has edited in Photomechanic, this flag would be set to TRUE and then aperture would check for EXIF and use this over any other form of copyright info. I havent been able to find a utility to edit this Copyright status field to see how this affects the behaviour of aperture.

All in all, I imagine a software update with the possibility of viewing both the EXIF and IPTC copyright info will end the problems. So one could continue using in camera EXIF, write PhotoMechanic IPTC and then import into Aperture, and tolerate the bug until the Apple engineers address it, since all the metadata is there regardless. One could also write IPTC with Aperture, and repair the created date with GraphicConverter (there is an option to revert the File created date to the EXIF created date).

Another solution is to not use EXIF copyright in-camera, and to use PhotoMechanic to write IPTC copyright, keywords etc before importing to aperture. One should not write the metadata as 'IPTC4XMP' as this embedded XMP will apparently will irritate use with Photoshop etc in the future as Photoshop will pay attention to the embedded XMP and not any possible XMP sidecar. One could write EXIF copyright at some stage after export from Aperture.