I normally use Photomechanic to add meta data to my images however on this one occasion I allowed my daughter to make selections in DxO Photolab. I hoped that I could just add a colour label or a rating to the images using Photolab and then see these when viewing the images in Photomechanic. Unfortunately, it has not worked. First it appears that PhotoLab has only applied the rating and colour label to the raw images and frustrating does not appear to offer a method of linking the camera generated jpeg for the purposes of ratings/colour label. Secondly while I have sixty images in PhotoLab taken on a single day rated as three star and with colour label of yellow, PhotoMechanic only finds 10 images.
The simple solution is to do it the long way and re-select the images in PhotoMechanic but I wonder if PhotoLab offers a method of synchronising and/or treating raw/jpeg pairs as a single image from the point of view of ratings and collections.
There is no direct way. I have used Exif tool to sort images by some Exif data. In my case I was trying to sort out messed up time zones. So I had exiftool sort images into subfolders based on time zone and then I used exiftool to apply the time offset.
My angle would be to try the following if you’re so inclined:
export all the RAWs to a temporary folder in JPG format with all metadata. This will put ratings into the Exif data of JPG files. Currently the ratings from DXO are only in the DOP files.
use something like exiftool to copy just the rating Exif tag from the temporary set of JPG files to the original JPG files. The presumption here is the files in the two directories have the same names.
@skids basically don’t use DxPL in this case but if you are ever desperate (and you would need to be desperate) then you could try the following if you are a Windows user.
This very kludgy procedure works on DxPL(Win) but it is not a fix to be used normally but it worked for me in testing (eventually, when I actually followed my own instructions to the letter!)!
DxPL(W) does not validate the name contained within the DOP so it will accept a DOP named as P1234567.RW2.DOP and use it even if the name within the DOP is P1234567.JPG.DOP!
So for the test
I created a test directory containing JPGs and associated RAWs
“Discovered” the JPGs and assigned a ‘Rating’ of 4 and a ‘Colour label’ of Orange
Had a quick look to make sure the DOP contained both fields!
Left PL6.8.0 running but “parked” on a directory that contained no images
Copied the .JPG.DOPS to the RAW subfolder and renamed the DOPs that had been copied from
the JPG directory to the Raw directory from .JPG.DOP to .RW2.DOP in my case (the RW2 is the RAW extension for my Lumix G9)
I have read elsewhere that there is some incompatibility between Photomechanic and DXO with other items such as tagging and keywords. I use IMatch for my DAM software where I filter, delete, star rate, add keywords, and colour code all my new RAW photos. After that I use DXO to do all (99%) of the editing needed (1% Adobe Elements) and then save to JPG. I find there is now no issues between the two software packages and they both read colour and star ratings added in either of the two software packages, and if a rating or colour code is added to the RAW before editing, the information is copied from the RAW to the JPG. The important bit here is to ensure the file names are the same. Once you have two names the software will read then as two separate files. IMatch also allows batch processing and allows simple copy and past of all metadata. Might be worth a try as IMatch does give a 30 day free trial.
