A broken pearl (generated by Midjourney). Credit: libre-software.net. License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Ubuntu: resolve the “perl: warning: Setting locale failed” problem
Last updated on October 11, 2022
Are you running Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04 or 22.04 desktop or server edition, and getting warning or errors when installing software via apt-get or aptitude?
Here is a typical error message:
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings: LANGUAGE = (unset), LC_ALL = (unset), LC_TIME = "es_ES.UTF-8", LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_TELEPHONE = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_MEASUREMENT = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_IDENTIFICATION = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8", LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8", LANG = "en_US.UTF-8" are supported and installed on your system.perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
Sometimes, trying to solve the problem using the update-locale or locale commands does not work and generates following error messages:
~ # sudo update-locale
perl: warning: Setting locale failed.
perl: warning: Please check that your locale settings:
LANGUAGE = (unset),
LC_ALL = (unset),
LC_PAPER = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_ADDRESS = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_MONETARY = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_NUMERIC = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LC_TELEPHONE = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_IDENTIFICATION = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_MEASUREMENT = "en_US.UTF-8",
LC_TIME = "es_ES.UTF-8",
LC_NAME = "de_DE.UTF-8",
LANG = (unset),
are supported and installed on your system.
perl: warning: Falling back to a fallback locale ("en_US.UTF-8").
or
~ # locale
locale: Cannot set LC_ALL to default locale: No such file or directory
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=es_ES.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=de_DE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
Solution to the perl locale problem
The solution is to export the missing locales to ~/.bash_profile. The following command is a one-command line:
echo "export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8export LANG=en_US.UTF-8export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8">>~/.bash_profile
You could also run each command separately:
echo "export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8">>~/.bash_profile
Alternatively, edit ~/.bash_profile “by hand” with nano, vim or a graphical editor like gedit or xed (Linux Mint).
Don’t forget to reboot and check if the new locales are applied with the locale command.
Another solution is to add the locale variables to /etc/environment instead of ~/.bash_profile.
By Johannes Eva, April 2017 – October 2022
5 thoughts on “How to edit image metadata on Linux using a graphical user interface”
fotoxx lets you change Metadata info, and choose your current image’s Caption and Comment as well as view images in directories with filename and some other Metadata as labels. You can set up trees of tags with Categories and put those in at the same time, to use for sorting the images into “album” groups for moving or copying out. The code is gtk and perl with many filetype handlers. Your labeling is stored in plain text files, easy to copy out into documents, transfer, edit, etc.
You should give some additional details, some tools write directly into the image file, others don’t. For example darktable does not change the original image, it writes into a sidecar file (.XMP).
You might also consider http://fastphototagger.sourceforge.net/, java based
I don’t know whether you actually tested Gthumb or not, but your statement that it is only capable of reading meta tags, couldn’t be further from the truth. And it seems to do a fairly good while it is at it!
All one have do is to press the ‘T’ key – either under the Thumbnail view or the “larger” view – and voilá: it reads any existing tags already embedded in the selected file. Next, you have to keep typing any new ones (just don’t forget to confirm, via the pull down list, to actually create any new tags) and you’re done.
I would also suggest that MaPiVi is an excellent program which needs to be on this list. It’s capable of editing and bulk-editing many kinds of image metadata, including IPTC Keywords (which is why I got it). It’s written in Perl/TK so it’s cross-platform. A somewhat old version of it is included in the Ubuntu Linux distribution.
One of the main drawbacks of MaPiVi is that it won’t handle the metadata in Nikon .NEF (raw) format files, which is pretty much the same as that in other formats such as JPEG.