Well, yes and no. It is strictly limited to keywords, ratings and description via ExifTool. But, for searching it leans heavily on Apple’s own metadata framework and Spotlight search engine for ultimate speed.
Indeed. I have come to trust it and rely on it and have never, ever been let down. But then I do use the part of ExifTool that renames the original file before writing any changes to a copy and, should such a write fail, the original file copy its always available. Only when everything has been verified does the renamed original get overwritten by the edited copy.
Understood. I think the thrust of what proponents of ExifTool are saying is that there is an amazingly reliable tool that does write directly to RAW files with no measurable risk. There are also users who have a non-XMP sidecar workflow, who currently cannot use PL as a DAM due to its lack of support for for direct writing to and synchronising of RAW files.
If everybody used ExifTool under the hood, that risk is minimised to practically zero. Which is why I chose to use it in my app.
We are only talking about metadata, not image data. But then Adobe write all their changes to XMP files, mixed in with the metadata as well. Now that is what I call a mess.
Indeed but that only applies to the image data and the EXIF metadata written by the camera. Separating image edits into sidecars, whether they be DOP or XMP can also lead to wholesale loss of edits and subsequent loss of time having to re-process hundreds of files.
Mainly because nobody seems to be interested in adhering to a single standard for metadata tags. What we are talking about here is whether writing a metadata tag, which is in a separate part of the file, can corrupt the image data part of the file.
After all, for certain types of photography, RAW files are not feasible and we don’t seem to have a nervous breakdown writing to original camera JPEG or TIFF files.
If we are really that worried about protecting the integrity of the image data in an image file, why do we allow it for some formats but not for others?
Some cameras use DNG as their RAW format. PL happily writes metadata directly to them.
To be (RAW) or not to be (RAW) that seems to be the question