@sgospodarenko and @Musashi my intention with the ‘Export option’ was to “protect” precious metadata from an “unauthorised” changes by DxPL and attempt to restore user confidence and avoid the “DAM sandwich”.
Needless to say I have been considering (not re-considering) my suggestion and it is clear from some discussions on the forum that some users make last minute adjustments to the metadata as well as the image editing!
A “blanket” copy of all metadata from the image (at its latest state just before the export) would certainly keep the keywords in order but might “undo” any last minute changes made by the user to the metadata e.g. ‘Rating’, ‘Rotation’ etc…
So rather than an “either/or” is it possible to consider a “hybrid” approach, slightly more complicated but it might go a long way to keeping more users “happy” than otherwise!
The current ‘Export’ options allow for customisation of what metadata is taken from the DxPL database and will be transferred to the metadata of the exported image. Could an additional option be added to allow ‘Image Data’ to be selected and the other (the current) options then used to designate what metadata, if any is to be taken from the database? An alternative would be to provide a pop-out to select the source of each metadata element rather than a simple selection box but that would require a bigger change to the UI.
However, if the facility to incorporate unchanged image metadata into an exported image is implemented I feel that the “hybrid” approach is worth a little more development effort to offer the prospect of keeping more users “happy”.
EDIT:-
Could the ‘Export’ process also be used to update RAW images, e.g.
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Export a new RAW sidecar based on the “hybrid” approach above
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If DxO ever considered updating embedded RAW metadata that could be “tested” or implemented via an ‘Export’ option, again with the “hybrid” option available.
It would be good if there was a “protect” option so that the existing sidecar or RAW file was automatically saved before the new version was created and that mechanism should be able to handle “duplicate” clashes automatically.
An alternative would be to use the suffix field to create new copies but in the case of just creating a sidecar file the original RAW would also need to be saved with a suffix as well as the new sidecar file. Using the suffix could provide the “protection” mechanism automatically but in both cases a DOP would also need to be output for the new RAW + sidecar or for the new RAW.
BUT please amend the warning message for duplicates so that the ‘Use unique’ was at least persistent for the session!
Or just use Virtual Copies and save a lot of disk space!