Thanks for working with me offline to investigate some of your images. The problem you are having is unique to the IPTC data, and I have not found a way to correct the values properly. However, the values you want are present in the EXIF and XMP metadata.
For your mapping rules you would leave the IPTC Value set to “none” and enter a value like this in the EXIF/Template Value:
Copyright
or ImageDescription
– the EXIF values
template:([+xmp:rights+])
or template:([+xmp:description+])
– the XMP values
You can find some tips on looking at the XMP data in this earlier Support Topic:
“Keywords” to “Description”
You can also use some MLA debugging features to get dumps of the metadata:
- Navigate to the Settings/Media Library Assistant Debug tab.
- Scroll down to the “MLA Reporting” text box and enter “0x11”. This will turn on MLA debug logging for metadata extraction.
- Click the Save Changes button to record your new setting.
- Optionally, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Reset” to clear the error log. You may not want to do this depending on how you manage your error log.
Once that’s done:
- Navigate to the Media/Assistant admin and click the “Edit” action for the image you want to investigate.
- On the Media/Edit Media screen click the “Map IPTC/EXIF metadata” link in the “Save” box at the top-right of the screen.
Then, go back to the Debug screen and:
- Enter “0” in the MLA Reporting text box to turn debug logic off.
- Scroll down to the Error Log text box and look through the data.
- You can also scroll to the bottom and click “Download” to get the log content in a text file.
There are lots of tools to look at the metadata in the file, but the above techniques will show you exactly what MLA is seeing and using.
You can also expand your templates to look for values in multiple places. For example:
template:([+exif:Copyright+]|[+xmp:rights+]|[+iptc:2#116+])
That will look first for the exif value, then the xmp value and finally the iptc value and will take the first value it finds.
I hope that gives you more ideas for your own analysis; every image is different. I am marking this topic resolved, but please post an update or follow up with me if you need more specific guidance. Thanks for your interest in the plugin.