@jch2103 Thank you for adding an additional level of complexity to the situation, sorry sarcasm is not allowed. Hope you are keeping well.
Once we can get PL5 to behave with its own ‘Ratings’ settings we should test scenarios that you identified alongside other software e.g. Fast Raw Viewer(FRV) setting ‘Ratings’ and recognising ‘Ratings’ set by PL5 or not as the case may be.
In fact while writing this I used FRV to set ‘Ratings’ for 3 RAW photos and, with metadata sync set, PL5 picked them up instantly! Changing one to 5 shows up in the DOP and the ‘xmp’ sidecar but FRV still sees it as 3! Getting FRV to copy the file to a subfolder it appears to have a 5 rating (need to check if there is a refresh function in FRV and if not make a request to the author).
As this is not a bug (the algorithm will soon be explained in FAQ) and the change of the behavior will take some time - we should find a good solution and not to mess up everything you’ll have to wait a bit.
Well the algorithm of the prioritization of the files containing this data has been changed with the introduction on xmp support (it also depends if it’s a master image or VC). Everything will be explained in details in FAQ very soon.
In addition, considering my use case scenario (using a laptop to make first edit and rating when on the go), how can I make it work again like I used to do using PL4 ?
Hi @sgospodarenko , @Crispy ,
The content has been produced and localized, our support team has received and should work on adding it to the website.
As for now here are some explanations
Hello Musashi,
if I use exclusively Photo Supreme as my DAM(and xmp files) and do not do any metadata editing within DPL should I turn on off “synchronization”. Up to now my understanding is to turn it off.
I hope the ‘full’ FAQ goes into more detail about ‘All other Metadata’. Currently, there are some serious bugs/issues with PL5 metadata handing that cause serious problems with users of 3rd party metadata products (as noted by comments to this thread). Unfortunately, turning off metadata synchronization in PL5 doesn’t solve all of these issues because of what PL5 writes to output files.
PL4.x simply copied metadata from the raw/XMP file to output files. It did a good job with this, and was consistent with 3rd party metadata products. There needs to be an option in PL5 to restore this behavior.
What I do not understand: when there is no entry in the database file and no xmp file for a RAW file, BUT there is a dop file containing a star rating. Why will it not be read?
I do not want to use a database file, especially if I cannot edit it and there is no error message when files cannot be found anymore because the are moved to a different folder (what I did).
Does anyone know a possibility to edit the database file content?
You can use any tool that can edit SQLite databases but you can destroy the database so be careful and operate on a copy to test your edits. If you are familiar with relational databases then you should be OK because it it not too complicated.
I use FlySpeed SQL Query (there is a free version).
I have played with the database (but while PL5 was running) to change a timestamp of a file and crashed PL5 totally and irreparably!! With PL5 shut down changing some things might be possible!? On Win10 I use DB Browser for SQLite version 3.12.2 which is free but beware any changing of the database is tedious and potentially “dangerous” but rating changes should be easy enough etc.
I am testing my Synchronisation strategy right now so I changed the DOP Ratings field from 5* to 0* and requested a ‘Sidecar’ ‘Import’ but PL5 changed the DOP value back to 5*!
I am not sure this has previously been the case with PL5 releases because many of my tests have been by “hacking” the DOP so it seems that they may be closing down certain “windows of opportunity” for “testing”.
If you are dealing with RAWs then you have the ‘xmp’ sidecar but I believe that Photo Supreme can also change the embedded ‘xmp’ for RAW files. You effectively need to be able to take the Rating from the DOP and create an ‘xmp’ sidecar with just that data which PL5 will import in preference to other sources iff timestamps are right (still unclear about timestamps in this context).
It might be possible to reduce this further but the minimum I seemed to be able to get away with for an xmp with “just” ‘Rating’ is
From my tests, it is apparent that PL5 never reads the Rank from a PL4 DOP file, even if there is no Rating in either the RAW or XMP files. It would seem that there is no forwards transfer of PL4 Rank to PL5 Rating. Even importing metadata from an XMP file doesn’t change the Rank until you make another change to the image, at which point, PL5 changes the DOP to PL5, deletes Rank and writes whatever rating it finds in the XMP file, which is usually 0. Thus losing any Rank/Rating set in PL4.
Joanna (@joanna) you know how I hate to contradict you but PL5 ingesting a PL4 DOP does work. I just used the data I used in the post above and in PL4 I set the ‘Rank’ to 3. PL5 happily read the DOP and created a new Virtual Copy (it had already “seen” the photo in my previous test and so a VC was inevitable) and the VC has a ‘Rating’ of 3.
I panicked that the data had been passed by an ‘xmp’ sidecar so I made a change to another photo in PL4 and then checked the directories which showed ‘xmp’ sidecar for first (the subject for the @John7 reply post above) but none for the other two photos. So if PL5 ignores PL4 DOPs how have I got the snapshots that I have? (remember I am on Windows 10 and PL5 has already seen this directory and the database was not clean before the test and this was an adhoc test rather than a meticulously executed, clean-room test and …
PL5 does read PL4 DOPs and convert ‘Rank’ to ‘Ratings’ according to my test (if I haven’t made a mistake!?) and PL5 has left the PL4.3.6 alone, at least up to the point of the snapshot!
PS:- In spite of creating VCs which normally create a larger DOP, PL5 made no changes to the DOP on closedown, because I had made no changes in PL5. This actually maintains some co-existence providing you do not make any changes in PL5 that would result in a material change to the status of the data. It means that if I clear out the PL5 database I can re-discover the photo and there will be no VC!
PPS:- This Topic was originally about Tags so I set tags on all four photos in PL4 red, green, green, red and those all made it into the PL5 VC[1] images.
