Regression in XMP parsing since exiftool 13.22 #348
Description
I was trying to update Immich to the latest exiftool version and I noticed that exiftool is now failing to parse a few XMP files used by the project for testing. For example, taking XMP file 2000.xmp:
❯ exiftool-13.21/exiftool 2000.xmp
ExifTool Version Number : 13.21
File Name : 2000.xmp
Directory : .
File Size : 10 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:10:00+00:00
File Access Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:10:50+00:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:10:48+00:00
File Permissions : -rw-r--r--
File Type : XMP
File Type Extension : xmp
MIME Type : application/rdf+xml
Warning : XMP is double UTF-encoded
XMP Toolkit : XMP Core 5.6.0
Creator Tool : Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1 (Macintosh)
Modify Date : 2000:09:27 14:35:33+02:00
Metadata Date : 2000:09:27 14:35:33+02:00
Create Date : 2000:09:27 14:35:33+02:00
❯ exiftool-13.22/exiftool 2000.xmp
ExifTool Version Number : 13.22
File Name : 2000.xmp
Directory : .
File Size : 10 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:10:00+00:00
File Access Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:10:50+00:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:10:48+00:00
File Permissions : -rw-r--r--
File Type : XMP
File Type Extension : xmp
MIME Type : application/rdf+xml
Warning : Superfluous BOM at start of XMP
MIME Encoding : utf-16le
Byte Order Mark : Yes
Newlines : Windows CRLF
As you can see, exiftool 13.22 fails to parse exif tags for this file, including only file information. This seems to happen because the file is UTF-16 encoded; converting it to UTF-8 fixes the problem:
❯ iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF-8 2000.xmp > 2000-utf8.xmp
❯ exiftool-13.22/exiftool 2000-utf8.xmp
ExifTool Version Number : 13.22
File Name : 2000-utf8.xmp
Directory : .
File Size : 5.1 kB
File Modification Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:19:52+00:00
File Access Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:19:53+00:00
File Inode Change Date/Time : 2025:08:29 13:19:52+00:00
File Permissions : -rw-r--r--
File Type : XMP
File Type Extension : xmp
MIME Type : application/rdf+xml
Warning : Superfluous BOM at start of XMP
XMP Toolkit : XMP Core 5.6.0
Creator Tool : Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.1 (Macintosh)
Modify Date : 2000:09:27 14:35:33+02:00
Metadata Date : 2000:09:27 14:35:33+02:00
Create Date : 2000:09:27 14:35:33+02:00
I checked the CHANGELOG and I didn't see any indication of this change. Is it a bug or expected behavior?