XMP metadata - unable to see clipping path in tiff

[JonAppy]

i have been banging my head against the wall with the problem for about a week. i suspect the problem lies in (what appears to me to be) adobe's habit of radically and frequently changing the content of its XMP metadata. that said, i am still hoping someone has a fix either via imagemagick improvement (bug fix?) or other suggestions (e.g. other tools to use on linux -- i am trying tiffinfo, exiftool, exiv2, etc.... not much luck yet!)

i am trying to use a clipping path in a tiff file. the clipping path exists within photoshop. when my client saves the files, we cannot see the clipping paths via imagemagick. i can open it in photoshop, do nothing other than save it as a tiff, and then can see the clipping path with imagemagick.

by looking at the tiff file with a text editor, i can see two different XMP tool kits are being used: x:xmptk="Adobe XMP Core 5.3-c011 66.145661, 2012/02/06-14:56:27" (mine) and x:xmptk="XMP Core 5.1.2" (theirs). this is despite the fact they are using a slightly newer version of photoshop than me (13.0.3 vs 13.0.1).

any precedence for this? help? clues?

thank you.
-jon

p.s. if you are serious about taking a look at the file in order to fix this, please let me know so i can arrange to send it to you directly. i do not wish to post the clients image data to a public forum; and i cannot create a broken example file with my version of photoshop. thanks.

[JonAppy]

upon further investigation, i think this may be a bug in imagemagick that is missing the clipping path in the EXIF (not XMP) header information on some tiffs. in particular, i was able to manually parse out the 8BIM metadata in both types of tiffs i have. using exiv2, i saw both had a key "Exif.Image.ImageResources" which had an 8BIM path defined in it. not sure why one is being recognized by imagemagick as a clipping path, and one is not. if someone is a guru concerning clipping paths and imagemagick, please let me know and i can send you the two files.

i used this document to help me decode the existence of the path, fwiw: http://www.adobe.com/devnet-apps/photos ... 7409_17587

-jon

[JonAppy]

solved! turns out my problem was actually with libtiff. the version that ubuntu uses is not recent enough to properly grab the clipping path from certain files. i had to update to the latest libtiff and compile imagemagick against that. then it could see clipping path on both.