Apple’s new operating system Snow Leopard was announced as an update that would not have many new features but rather lots of improvements under the hood. Preview is one good example: not only have they added useful image browsing options, but they have finally fixed a number of metadata issues.
The most important improvements are the correct representation of timestamps, at last! This is how Preview under Leopard represented the EXIF data in the file information dialog (3rd and 4th line):
The correct time is 15:54:47+01:00 though, i.e. it was taken in time zone UTC+1. Preview added the current time zone offset of my MacBook to this already time-zoned value, resulting in 17:54:47 as I am on UTC+2.
The same image now shows the correct time under Snow Leopard:
Also, they have fixed an issue with special characters. My surname has the German ligature character “ß” in it, which confused Preview under Leopard and it cut off half my name:
In the first and the last two lines, the original metadata read “Klaus Meßlinger”. Now, this has been corrected:
Additionally, a greater number of IPTC values are shown and the whole interface has been streamlined. Good job.