It would be great if you could create a possibility to add or make changes in metadatas for one and batch of pictures.
I am selling my photos to different stocks, for that it is very comfortable and time saving to add IPTC metadatas like (title, caption, headline, localisation, keywords) just after editing a photo, directly from the editing software. Actually after editing a photo in DxO Photolab 4, I must add my metadata in Adobe Bridge. It would be very nice to do all the work directly in DxO Photolab.
Sebastian, if you are doing serious work with stock, I’d recommend an application like Photo Mechanic which can handle metadata with templates and selected fields. Photo Mechanic is a bear to initially set up and I wouldn’t recommend it to someone not shooting commercially, in a genre where metadata is important:
sports
weddings
stock (whether micro, landscape or paparazzi)
On the other hand, if you do need/want to use metadata and captions, Photo Mechanic makes creating and managing them much, much easier. Don’t forget to make an executive decision about what fields you would like to use and remove the rest of them from the interface so they don’t distract you. Here’s the limited set of fields I fill in for my sports photography:
Deciding which fields to fill in is the most important decision to make when using a metadata application. Any application which doesn’t let the photographer limit these fields will cripple his/her ability to efficiently process metadata as there are at least 120 metadata fields to choose from. With just the metadata fields you intend to use right in front of you, filling in metadata becomes a simple matter of fill-in-the-blanks (which is plenty of work, I’m not sure adding metadata even with a dedicated, very efficient application with templates doesn’t take almost as long as the actual processing – part of the slow down for me is trying to identify players from the opposite teams: while I have a numbered list, numbers are not visible on these uniforms except from behind).
The new variant Photo Mechanic Plus allows the photographer to build permanent catalogues (thankfully per image data is still stored in xmp sidecars) and would be the version I’d get to manage stock.
There’s no way in a dozen years that Photolab would be able to handle metadata the way Photo Mechanic does. There’s twenty years of dedicated work in Photo Mechanic and it shows. If DxO is that intent on building a serious metadata tool, it would make more sense to make it a paid add-on like ViewPoint. Even in that case, the new MetaView should still play well with others.
What I would like to see from Photolab is storing keywords and ratings in the .xmp sidecar and not in the .dop file. Here our interests coincide as for these additional Photolab metadata improvements to be of much use, Photolab should play well with the outside world. Perhaps it matters less to you as you’d add your limited metadata fields on export to jpg.
But would the DxO Photolab fields be enough for most stock sites or would you have to take the finished files and process them with an external application to add some obligatory boilerplate fields? There’s about six different ways to designate artist/copyright and who knows what stock company requires which ones. Metadata is a deep rabbit hole and I’d really prefer that DxO focus on interoperability so that Photolab photographers can use other dedicated metadata tools without having to do handstands moving photos between applications.
Joanna is not unbiased here: she has a metadata tool which is either competitive/cooperative with Photolab depending on which way DxO goes with handling metadata. Biased or not, she’s right. If Photolab cooperated better with her metadata application it will cooperate better with most metadata applications. Happily the standards here are public ones, XMP files, IPTC fields. Joanna perhaps you could be more specific about what the public metadata standards are (and which Photolab should observe)?
The problem with Adobe’s apps is that they don’t adhere to those standards in offering a non-standard way of writing things like hierarchical keywords as a default option in Lightroom and Bridge.
My app can now automatically read that non-standard format, translate it into the standard format and rewrite it so that those same apps and others can still read it.
Joanna, the list of full specs in PDF format is somewhat useful. What is probably more useful to the general reader here is a slightly opinionated history of photo metadata and the standards which exist, when they came into force and who complies with what.
Your sentence about how Adobe broke hierarchical keywords is very useful. These big companies like Adobe and Microsoft and Apple just can’t help themselves from following the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model. In this case, by breaking the keywords standard instead of following it.
Hopefully whatever metadata support DxO build into Photolab will comply with standards and play well with other applications (i.e. metadata stored in the XMP file only in standards compliant format and not in the .dop or the database).
1 Like
Deneice
(French photographer | PL5, Film Pack and NIK suite user)
11
Just a copy/paste about another topic regarding this missing feature for a too long time now…
I dream of a strong cross compatibility regarding XMP file between apps that manage XMP/IPTC fields.
Stop using author, title and keywords in a proprietary .dop file that’s too messy and dangerous ! And please give us a window to read and edit all the XMP/IPTC fields fulfilled by another external app that are ghost data inside PL4 that we do not even know until we use an external app to read/edit them.
Do the same experience I did :
I full-filled XMP fields into On1 Photoraw 2021, It created a .xmp sidecar next to my raw file. Those fields are perfectly readable and editable with XnViewMP (free software…developed by only one guy just FYI !) .
If I open again my raw into DXO PL4, it displays only the keyword. Nothing for Author nor Copyright that do exist in the XMP in the right fields.
So now, if I full-fill Author and Copyright and add one more keywords though DXO PL4 none of them are written in the XMP sidecar file but into the DXO .dop file maybe to preserve the integrity of the XMP file !!
Once my raw processed into a JPEG file, I could see all my keywords into On1 or XnViewMP that came from one side the .xmp file and the other side the .dop file !!! And the Author and Copyright fields are not those from DXO but those previously created with ON1 that has been respected but forgetting the DXO fields in a strange way. Sorry but frankly speaking, What a mess !
I know that some of the DXO team prefere DXO PL4 to stay and concentrate in a one strong feature instead of offering too much but please integrate as soon as possible the metadatas management. It’s a basic feature for years in the competitors apps and an essential tool for photographers during the curling/editing process. We are not asking for a complicated catalog or search engine (not yet) but inviting us to manage metada with an external app just for this feature is just infair, time consuming and pricey. V5 is on the way, please the Team, dont’ miss our expectations !!
No to more metadata management within Photolab but co-operating with other apps by storing metadata in the XMP and not the DOP is just basic good manners.
I’ve noticed that Photolab also strips some metadata, in specific headline/title, when processing images with full metadata sets. This kind of vandalism of our existing metadata should stop right now.
Deneice
(French photographer | PL5, Film Pack and NIK suite user)
13
Not only the headline/title but also the keywords !!!
If we have never created the keywords inside PL4 but managed the metadata with and external app (XnViewMP for example) , PL4 read them from the XMP sidecar (field dc>subject[1] and lr>hierarchicalSubject[1]) without problem.
BUT TAKE CARE because that is where PL4 can be dangerous for our metadatas, if we do edit or create others keywords inside PL4, it writes those datas nexto the normative format XMP sidecar into its own sidecar file with .dop extension. That’s crazy because RAW’s metadata are no more editable with an external app, It breaks the XMP compliance !
It’s urgent to desactivate this feature by rendering it grey asap to not permit to edit more title and kewords till DXO resolve the bug or decide to offer a strong metadata manager in the next release compatible with the XMP schema that XnViewMP, Adobe, ON1 and others do respect
