This post is a survey we have done about IM's capabilities converting images between JPG, TIF and PSD formats with different kinds of IPTC profile data (clipping path excluded - it has been mentioned in an earlier post and I was very impressed that it took you only 1h 10min to find and fix the problem!)
To examine IM's capabilities converting images between JPG, TIF and PSD formats with different kinds of IPTC profile data we prepared a file in Photoshop CS2 with as many fields (such as Document title, Author, Author title, Description, Description writer, Keywords etc) in different formats and then converted them to other formats using IM's 'convert' command on Windows with IM 6.3.6.
Please see the table showing the results at http://javabog.dk/filer/iptc_oversigt.html
An 'X' means that the IPTC property was transfered to the new file.
No 'X' means that the IPTC property was lost in the new file.
(on basis of Photoshop's IPTC viewer (File | File Info))
First of all, it can be seen that conversion JPG <-> TIF loose some of the IPTC properties, namely:
Address
City
State/Province
Postal Code
Country
Phone(s)
E-mail(s)
Website(s)
IPTC subject code
Description Writer
Intelectual genre
IPTC scene
Location
ISO Country code
Right Usage Terms
Secondly, it can be seen that conversion PSD -> JPG works very well (all fields are retained), but that other PSD conversions all fields are lost (a special case was when a TIF file was read and then written as a PSD file. In this case Photoshop couldnt read the resulting file).
Thank you for an otherwise great product!
Jacob Nordfalk