Unicode characters in photo metadata

I have achieved the following conclusion – NGG applies excessive UTF8 encoding when it’s not needed (text string are already UTF8-encoded). I was able to fix this by adding an “intelligent” encoding function:

function utf8_encode_safe($str) {
return mb_detect_encoding($str, ‘UTF-8’) == ‘UTF-8’? $str : utf8_encode($str);
}

and replacing all calls for utf8_encode() in meta.php with utf8_encode_safe()

I am hoping the authors can validate and confirm my solution, and also integrate the fix in the product.

Thanks
Vladimir

Can please someone from Photocrati comment on this? The issue remains and to this day no one has acknowledged it. Thanks.