What are the benefits and drawbacks of this workflow?
I tried this combination. The main complaint I had - was that ACDSee (1-5) ratings do not show up as star ratings in other applications since they’re stored in a proprietary format.
I would have liked to be able to filter by 4-5 star images in DxO PL to view all images I planned to edit, but this wasn’t possible.
Hello and welcome.
Have you reached out to ACD and asked them if there’s any possibility for them to write their star ratings into standard xmp format?
I’ve not used acd but it’s such a common application so I would believe that it should have an option to write these tags.
Many other people are complaining about this in the forums, so I’m fairly confident it’s a lacking functionality. But I agree there *should be a way to do that.
In any case, I decided to use Mylio for now as it meets all of my needs.
It seems ACDSee releases the updated Mac version around November each year, so I’m waiting to see if this changes in version 10.
The ratings, labels & keywords need to be in the IPTC metadata to be read by other programs. In the latest version of ACDSee Ultimate 24 if you right click on the image, select Metadata (see image 1) & click on Embed Metadata, then select Options. Ensure all the options under Choose Metadata to Embed are ticked (see image 2) & click OK. When you select DxO Photolab as your external editor you should find ratings, labels & keywords should be transferred. On returning from the external program right click the imported image, select Metadata again & this time select the option to Import IPTC keywords. This will restore the keywords to the ACDSee Metadata in the imported image, This is the workflow I use all the time. I start off in ACDSee as a DAM adding labels, ratings & keywords as appropriate. Then, after going through the above steps, I select DxO Photolab as my external editor. After making the necessary adjustments in DxO I export the image to Affinity Photo as a 16bit Tiff file at 300dpi where I finish the edit using the layer capabilities of the latter. Finally I save the finished edits still as a tiff file & import the IPTC keywords as above. I hope this helps.
I’m sorry, I completely neglected to mention that I’m speaking about ACDSee Photo Studio 9 on Mac, which is lacking some features vs the much better Windows version.
On the Mac version, ACDSee keywords, categories, and ratings do not transfer as-is to other programs. There are some hacky workarounds to make it work, but the IPTC keywords and ACDSee keywords are managed separately (crazy), and saving ratings to the files / sidecars did not surface as 1-5 stars in other apps when I was testing.
It works well in Windows. DXO sees the ratings and labels positioned by ACDSee.
The major problem i had with ACDSee is that you have to use their proprietary keywords to benefits fully of its catalog. If you use IPTC keywords, it is not as good for search, classify etc…
So i finally switches to something else (Excire because of the AI Keywords). Otherwise, i really liked it.
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I’m not sure what you mean by propietary keywords. As I said in my previous post if you carry out the Import IPTC keywords instruction they are then imported into the ACDSee database & are then searchable. Also the latest version of Photo Studio Ultimate for Windows has AI keywords which are also searchable.
I am using Acdsee Pro 2023, integration with PL it works well for ratings and labels. I set ratings in AcdSee and see them in PL. Sometimes I change them in PL and Acdsee updates its database.
However there are drawbacks:
- If you already have embeded Acdsee metadata and update rating in PL Acdsee doesn’t update embedded metadata. I you have to rebuild the database from embedded metadata you loose your modified ratings.
- Hierarchical keywords are not exported. They are only stored in database and in private XMP namespace. There is no way to see hierarchical keywords in PL
Yes, you can export hierarchical keywords to IPTC keywords but you loose the hierarchy and you can’t modify them in PL or in any other program
I did some tests with 2024 version and it works exactly the same as version 2023 so I didn’t upgrade.
AI keywords are kind of useless, IMHO. In my photos AI detected rocks as works of art, hills as buildings 
I referred to hierarchic keywords. In the last version (2024), they have included a mean to copy proprietary keywords to IPTC keywords and vice-versa. I have not upgraded yet.
I haven’t seen that they had included AI keyword too. It worth a try of this version then.