Hi Bryan,
I have an old Version 6.14, but that’s exactly what I see in KatalogEinstellungen
I have done the setting 6 years ago, and never touched…
At the moment I don’t know if it was a question or a stement by you
I have done the setting 6 years ago, and never touched…
At the moment I don’t know if it was a question or a stement by you
Guenterm It was a statement that was also a question and thank you for responding. I am not a Lightroom user and will probably not become one!
I am a hobby photographer that takes lots of photos of our garden and the gardens we visit, which we normally did for 2 x 1 week holidays in different parts of the U.K. before …
When on holiday I would have to take photos regardless of the weather (rain typically excluded) and light, position of the sun etc. and needed a product like DxO to make rapid “improvements” to the JPG photos I took (starting with free copies of OpticsPro with the deprecated OpticsPro 7 Smart Lighting my favourite feature). I only started taking JPG+RAW in 2018 so from 2003 to early 2018 all photos are JPG only!
The bulk of my photos have been taken on Panasonic Bridge cameras and an LX7 but from 2017 I moved onto the Panasonic 4/3s cameras and added an Olympus EM1 MkII about 1 year ago and a second hand Panasonic G9 replaced my G90 some months ago.
Hi Bryan,
you are welcome…and I’m also a hobby photographer. LR was my first software for Raw and JPEG development, and my first step for cataloging, kewording DAM stuff…I stopped working with LR after they have gone to cloud version.
Let’s wait and see what comes 
Yeah about the gardens in England I have heard a lot of intersting stories, or seen some documentation on german TV.
So always good light an a lot of intersting motives
Sunny greetings from Germany
Guenter
Guenterm Thank you for the sunny greetings it is currently very overcast here.
We have made two trips out this month hoping for some Autumn colour but it has been rather disappointing. Some trees simply have withered leaves and others do not seem to be changing colour as fast as they have in the past and the weather has now become very unpredictable!
Good news!
We had this afternoon a teamviewer session with a person from the support. It is solved: my projects and key-words are back!!!
Kudos to the support team!
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@rsp that is really good news I am glad the DxO support team were able to help.
Please remember to take and secure backups, just in case!
In addition it is a good idea to keep a journal noting dates and times (and names) of backups, major keywording exercises, PL (and any other software you use on your photos or their metadata) releases etc.; effectively a simply “audit” trail so that it is possible to assess what has been lost if you need to fall back to a database dump.
I encountered a “bug” today which was actually something I did last December, i,e, it was obviously me experimenting and an unusual action for me to take and I do not remember the whys and wherefores at all! A simple journal/diary would have helped!!
You’re right, I used to do that at work. But… photography is NOT work in my mind.
Anyway, I’ll try to take notes from time to time and make backups every week from now.
@rsp the “lecture” was as much a reminder to me as anything else.
The database dumps are a good “chore” and help protect your investment in the creative editing you have undertaken, add a few comments to the end of the standard naming and they become a bit of a journal, take a dump just before a new (major or minor) release (appropriately named) and you are effectively logging the dates that you installed a new release.
The DOPs and the database can act as a store for the various attempts at refining the editing process but those edits are nameless (but not faceless). Creating a preset allows those attempts to be organised (and re-organised using a simple file manager) but they need to be secured as well so back them up to protect your “investment”.
I already have a place on the F: drive in ‘MY PHOTOS Other’ which I just updated prior to backing up that drive later today (it was very out of date but took seconds to bring it up to date!)
I have just copied the ‘MY PHOTO-Catalogs’ directory (it contains the DxO database files & backups, amongst others bits and pieces) from the E: drive (SSD) to the F: drive (HDD).
Projects I have no experience of whatsoever.
Rather than considering it a chore think of it as protecting the “joy” you experience in your photography and long may that continue.
Now to follow my own advice and start backing up my drives!!
And I’ll begin as of today my own weekly backups…
Thanks for your message.
Have a nice weekend!
Anyone using the PhotoLab database without sidecar .dop and .xmp files is playing Russian roulette. With five cartridges out of six chambers, not one.
Keywords and metadata are supposed to be stored in the sidecar .xmp. I’m worried a bit about .dop files being converted to PhotoLab 5 unintentionally. I’ll be stuck using both PhotoLab 4 and PhotoLab 5 for at least a year as most of my computers are on Mojave.
Keen to hear some more detailed sitreps from you, Bryan @BHAYT. Thanks for sharing what you’ve found so far.
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Alec @uncoy I have come across your posts with respect to DxO no longer supporting certain models/OS versions of Mac. With respect to my posts in this thread it started because some other users experienced problems when upgrading from PL4 to PL5. I had also had the same problem so I did some digging and wrote the posts, one of which included the phrase you quoted!
I have never worried about the database in the past and have never had to but on this particular release… There was nothing in my database that mattered (albeit I managed to recover it anyway) but for others it represented the results of a lot of effort.
In the case of @rsp DxO helped to salvage that investment and I am glad that they helped, if I was being critical I would probably suggest that it should never have happened in the first place but …
I was also under the wrong impression that the database did not hold an up-to-date copy of the editing data and that the DOP was the sole custodian but that was a very wrong assumption. Effectively the database is the prime custodian and PL goes to some lengths to protect the database entry, creating a ‘Virtual Copy’ whenever it is in doubt!
So what have I “discovered” so far
- Changing the Uuid at the end of the DOP does not cause an instant VC.
- Changing the Uuid located just after the ‘ShouldProcess…’ field causes an immediate VC. It is also probable that the file date timestamps are changed by the software I used to change the DOP and that alerted PL to the occurrence of a potential change.
- Changing the keywords in the DOP has no effect, PL5 currently appears to ignore the change and quickly changes the DOP back to the original value.
- Adding a keyword to the DOP and changing the Uuid (from 2 above) will result in a virtual copy with the new keyword.
- The ‘Name’ line in the DOP is not used as a checking mechanism, changing it will not have any impact and PL5 will change it back quickly (as part of a DOP update).
- I did cut and paste the editing from one photo DOP and pasted it into another DOP leaving the top and tail of the “old” DOP intact and managed to get PL5 to accept the new editing (with no VC) but using a preset is a lot easier!!
I would conjecture that a DOP will only be imported into the database if there is no entry in the database already otherwise it will come in as a ‘Virtual Copy’. What plans DxO have for the keywords in the DOP I am not sure but a command that allows for its import would be useful in the event that it is the only data available to a user.
I personally would like more controls to allow virtual copies to be “promoted” to the [M]aster status and the old master either to become a virtual Copy or be replaced entirely.
If you have read any of my posts during PL5 testing you will know that I have concerns about the underlying code. The database structures are incredibly “thin” compared with Lightroom, Photo Supreme etc. and others have commented on this but that only matters if there are any risks of system crashes at critical stages in the database update process or software bugs.
The latter brings us back to the reason for this thread in the first place!? The good news is that securing the database both physically and using the ‘Backup’ option in PL5 can go a long way to reducing the risk of the loss of investment.
Finally we have the question of the metadata itself being maintained in the actual JPEG and DNG and in ‘xmp’ sidecar files for RAW files. I know that there are PL5 users that want to be able to store metadata in sidecar files for JPG and others that want to store that metadata in the RAWs themselves. There are packages that allow for both options and currently PL5 follows the Lightroom line so metadata comes from and goes to the JPEG and DNG and to and from the ‘xmp’ sidecar for RAW files.
Many, many years ago a new release of Zoner damaged the exif data of some of my files, it was fixed quickly but the backup strategy needs to be able to cope with the fact that the data you are backing up may be corrupt and the backup copy is actually the intact copy! My backup strategy uses Beyond Compare which will warn about such occurrences but it is too easy to force an overwrite of the data and for speed I do not use BC in data compare mode, i.e. it uses size and date/timestamps for speed.
@sgospodarenko has recently posted an “annotated” DOP in response to requests from users in various posts.
Hope this helps.
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