Image metadata input has unrealistic restrictions for dates and field lengths.

[Paul Coddington]

1. It is not possible to set a date taken for old photographs. Try tagging a photo taken in, say, 1926. It will not be saved and will come back blank when the file is reopened.

2. IPTC fields are short, for example, some longer country names must be entered abbreviated rather than in their correct form.

[- S -]

I suspect the reason for the date issue (item No. 1) is Serif are using Exiftool behind the scenes to read and write metadata and it's 32-bit.

The problem with 32-bit is it won't be able to handle dates before 1970-01-01 00:00:00 due to 1970 Epoch time.

Therefore, if a pre-1970 "Date Taken" metadata tag was written by alternative software capable of handling a greater date range (or Exiftool with 64-bit Perl for example), although the pre-1970 metadata tags will be in the file, Affinity Photo won't be able to display them – despite Windows File Explorer displaying the pre-1970 "Date Taken" field correctly.

If you attempt to write a pre-1970 "Date Taken" tag using Affinity Photo, as you have found, it will ignore what you typed and write the "Date Taken" DateTimeOriginal metadata tag as 1969-12-31 23:59:59.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help you with your problem, I'm just providing a bit of information.

 

[- S -]

With the field length of the country name issue (item No.2), it's likely this is due to a limitation in the IPTC specification.  The tag Affinity Photo is using for the "IPTC (Image) > Country" field is the IPTC "7.4. Country (legacy)" tag.

https://www.iptc.org/std/photometadata/specification/IPTC-PhotoMetadata#country-legacy

XMP: XMP-photoshop:Country
IIM: IPTC:Country-PrimaryLocationName

 

The information on the IPTC website for this tag (see above link) says "Read the IIM note about Max bytes for text".  Therefore, it looks like there's a maximum number of bytes (64 bytes) for text in this field, which is likely why it's limited to 32 characters.

https://www.iptc.org/std/IIM/4.2/specification/IIMV4.2.pdf

2:101
Country/PrimaryLocationName
Not repeatable, maximum 64 octets, consisting of graphic characters plus spaces.

 

[Paul Coddington]

21 hours ago, - S - said:

I suspect the reason for the date issue (item No. 1) is Serif are using Exiftool behind the scenes to read and write metadata and it's 32-bit.

The problem with 32-bit is it won't be able to handle dates before 1970-01-01 00:00:00 due to 1970 Epoch time.

Therefore, if a pre-1970 "Date Taken" metadata tag was written by alternative software capable of handling a greater date range (or Exiftool with 64-bit Perl for example), although the pre-1970 metadata tags will be in the file, Affinity Photo won't be able to display them – despite Windows File Explorer displaying the pre-1970 "Date Taken" field correctly.

If you attempt to write a pre-1970 "Date Taken" tag using Affinity Photo, as you have found, it will ignore what you typed and write the "Date Taken" DateTimeOriginal metadata tag as 1969-12-31 23:59:59.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help you with your problem, I'm just providing a bit of information.

 

Clearly a bug because the EXIF specification stores dates as strings in YYYY-MM-YY HH:NN format.

It is hard to believe that is 2024 and there it is still an uphill battle to tag images with the most basic and fundamental metadata, such as a correctly spelled name (unicode, not bastardized to ASCII and not abbreviated in length to fit an arbitrarily short field) or a date taken so that libraries of images can be accessed and retrieved using Search.

Adobe, Affinity and Microsoft all have fundamental metadata bugs that halt progress, and some metadata bugs have been ignored by Adobe and Microsoft for more than 10-15 years. Now my hopes that I can tag images with Affinity are dashed for the time being as well.

[DWright]

I have logged this with our developers.