I don’t know about PM, but most software no longer directly reads or writes EXIF tags, since they are considered legacy and “deprecated” in favour of XMP tags. PL5 reads and writes XMP:Rating.
And, although you say PM deals exclusively with IPTC, there isn’t a true IPTC tag for rating.
XMP:Rating maps to:
XMP-acdsee:Rating
XMP-dex:Rating
XMP-iptcExt:Rating
XMP-prism:Rating
XMP-xmp:Rating.
So, in writing XMP:Rating you are, in fact writing an IPTC tag but, in fact, the XMP-iptcExt:Rating tag is a structure and RatingValue is only one part of it.
I would be interested in seeing an XMP sidecar produced by PM for an image that has a rating. Could you post either the whole file or a screenshot of the part that contains the rating?
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
42
Joanna: Sure but Windows Info-tag is just using EXIF. I checked it yesterday with EXIF Tools manually. Some software doesn´t care at all about XMP just EXIF or non-embedded IPTC.
Yes, that sounds about right - not keeping up with newer standards which have deprecated such tags a long time ago. Which tag is it writing to?
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
44
ITPC is not all that new either and also have a few obsolete elements kept just of compatibility reasons.
Here to some intresting:
The number of EXIF-elements in my testfile, according to EXIF Tools, are no less than 266!
In EXIF Data Viewer i see more modest 58 supported elements that I can edit and in PhotoLibrary of Photolab there are just three open elements to my knowledge beside the elements it just displays. The rest are ghosted!
Another thing I observed is that EXIF Tools just can´t handle our scandinavian characters like ÅÄÖ and åäö at all. Quite a few other countries like Germany hos som odd characters too. That might also be a problem if working with EXIF Tools (who might work with ASCII or something. EXIF Data Viewer handle these characters perfectly fine. When I was a productmanager för Microsoft products and Windows-software a few years in the nineties at the biggest distributor in the Nordic Area of Europe. A lot of my work was to help our 200 different software vendors to adapt their softwares to the Swedish market. As an example a Windows software for emulation an IBM AS/400 could have one character set downstream (EBCDIC), an other in Windows clipboard (ANSI) and a third when typing (like ASCII). It took a few years to get the americans to understand. That´s also a reason why FotoWare doesn´t recommend to mix MAC and PC-versions of their client software Fotostation in the same company network.
Well the americans used to ask me if we really needed those strange character (like ÅÄÖ and åäö and I used to turn the mailing back excluding some of their characters asking them is they understood what I wrote. We used to say that ÅÄÖ was the biggest employer in the IT-industry in that time. Microsoft also sold Microsoft Works to small associations and their customers directly complained about they couldn´t print the paragraf signs they could see on screen, but not print before somebody (like I) rewrote the printerdrivers for them. So characters matters too.
I think we might have a chat with Kirk Baker or some other developer at Camera Bits in order to ask them to fork elements like IPTC Title/Headline, Subject/Description, Rating and Comment just to mention some of the most important. Both Lightroom and PM Plus 6 also use the Color Class-element to color tag the files in IPTC. In PM Plus we can even selecy a color schema that matches Lightroom to make metadata exchane smooth, but in PhotoLibrary that element is ghosted too. They just use rating. If Camera Bits forked the data or at least opened the EXIF namespace in XMP we could easily do it ourselves with the excellent variable-support there is in PM Plus.
So my conclusion is that it´s really a lot that can go wrong when pushing XMP-metadata both ways between any of the programs I have talked about like Photolab 5, Lightroom, Photo Mechanic and not the least with the very importand metadata viewers in Windows Image Viewer or Windows Explorer Properties Info Tab. I think it´s really important that our metadata displays correctly not just in our IPTC-centered software bot also in EXIF of compatibility reasons and I just can´t understand why this isn´t fixed a long time ago - hello Microsoft and all metadata-software manufacturers (no named (except Microsoft )and forgotten), time for some action before you fall back on the pillow!
Why don’t you work together one or more existing DAM’s (of course including IMatch) to make the connection to existing DAM’s seemingless.
Yours,
Ruud
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
46
Ruud, I have tried to do that with Camera Bits when I have experienced problems myself. In my opinion Camera Bits has the most responsive support I have ever come across since the beginning of the nineties. They really listens.
It was actually on my initiative they fixed a problem with the important Edit-function in PM Plus 6, which is a key to a smooth collaboration between PM Plus and Photolab, a potential show stopper for me. From the beginning it just could open one image at the time (a bug). Now it´s seamless with the number you decide you like to open in Photolab - select the images - right click and select the Edit in Photolab. This is extremely important since we have complaints here about how slow Photolab is to render the images in folders with maybee a tousand images. If one open the same folder in PM Plus and select a suitable number of files at the time you don´t get punished by integrated programs like Lightroom or Photolab PhotoLibrary. That speeds up the process considerably.
Stenis
(Sten-Åke Sändh (Sony, Win 11, PL 6, CO 16, PM Plus 6, XnView))
47
Joanna: I tested to update the EXIF with Exif Data Viewer. After that i checked in Windows and they appeared there all of them. I updated the elements beginning with XP at the top and the rating element “Rating”. Så Windows is just leaning on those and doesn´t give a shit about either ITPC whether it is embedded in XMP or not. EXIF embedded in XMP as a namespace isn´t uset at all either.
Today my workflow works perfectly fine if we look at the one way IPTC-metadata with one restriction - the use of non-hiarchical keywords - called “structured” in PM. What I tag in PM Plus is flowing automatically from my RAW–files XMP-metadatasidecars via the process of my RAW-files in Photolab 5 and it’s export via Photolab 5 to my JPEG-files. That includes for example even the IPTC “Image data”-elements that are ghosted today in the IPTC-interface of Photolab PictureLibrary today.
BUT, despite that some of the most important IPTC-elements like Title/Headline, Caption/Description, Comment etc. are maintained in that flow, the maybee most used tools to consume that metadata in WINDOWS (all versions used now) IS NOT able to see that meyadata because it doesn’t giva shit about that data since it’s just looking at the corresponding element of the EXIF-data. Data embedded since forever in digital image-files.
So what is needed, is that all tools saving XMP needs to fork that data even to EXIF both to the EXIF-namespace in XMP and the traditional EXIF-elements in all types of XMP-kompatible image-files.
