When I browse my RAW images in a grid view in an external raw photo viewer (i.e. PhotoMechanic (PM) or Fast Raw Viewer (FRW)), I want to see if they have been processed/edited (in PL) or not.
The DAM in PhotoLabs is a bit slow and not what I use for culling and ratings of photos.
I have noticed the new Processed/Unprocessed flag in Photo Labs 5.1.2
Is there a way to make this tag visible in such external photo viewers?
An alternative would be to make the existence of .dop sidecar visible in PM or FRV.
Can either of these two conditions be translated into for example an xmp colour label, as that tag is widely supported by PM and FRW?
Iâm currently running an exiftool script that sets edited rawâs xmp colour labels to green (=edited), but that only works with edits saved in xmps (not with .dop).
I posted the same question on the Fast Raw Viewer forum, but the answer was âNoâ:
How do you quickly identify highly rated photos that have not been edited yet from a high level?
We all work differently: Personally I have a work flow that avoids the whole problem, I store unprocessed photos in a working directory, do all of the culling with Fast Raw Viewer before I even go near PhotoLab, and only move the photos to their final resting place after I have finished editing them.
However to answer your question, I suspect that getting external viewers to parse the DxO dop files will be a non-starter as I donât believe DxO officially publish the data format of the dop files. This effectively means they can change it any time they like, which potentially makes coding against the âobserved file formatâ a waste of time as it could change and invalidate the work.
That said, if you have any kind of programming skills, then it is relatively straightforward to write a script/program to parse the information that you need out of the dop files, as the dop files are text files with a formal syntax that follows fixed rules. Of course that will only allow you to identify the names of the files that match your criteria, whether a list of files will be of any use to you in your work flow will depend on what you wish to do with the files.
I would think this problem can be solved simply by âdoes the .dop existâ as PL does not create one unless you do something with the photo in the Customise screen.
As others already noted, to take advantage of PL5âs internal flags would require parsing either the DOP sidecar or the PL5 database. I donâ think that would be trivial.
I donât know if this will help you, but PL writes to the XMP\tiff\Software\Software\0 tag in its output files (e.g., âDxO PhotoLab 5.0â, etc.). Iâm not familiar with PM or FRV, but you may be able to use that tag with ExifTool for colors/etc.
I use IMatch. IMatch can show color coding for masters and versions, making it easy to see which raw files have been processed into JPG/TIF/etc. versions. See screenshot.
Looking into the .dop files i see the following tags:
Processing Status not present
Processing Status = 1 [raw edits made, .dop has being created]
Processing Status = 3 [the image has been processed/exported]
Is there a way for these tags to be passed on to the .xmp sidecar?
That would make it much easier to interpret them with external browsers and create conditional scripts with EXIFTool.
Itâs certainly something an individual could do, but it would require some programming to read the .dop file and then write the values into the XMP file. But either the user would have to create a custom XMP name space to store the data or write it into some existing tag with hope that it wouldnât conflict with existing/future tag values. And it would be a one-off, not easily shared with other uses. It would also have the risk of being rendered obsolete by any changes DxO makes to the (proprietary) .dop file format.