Metadata migration

[dickl]

Long time user of Photo Supreme as my go to Metadata editor. I import, label and fill in many fields with my name copyright etc. Works great!

My RAW editor of choice has been DxO's Photolab for the last few years and I like it very much. One of the compatibility problems with it though, is it has it's own sidecar system (.dop) and does not play well with the standard xmp standard used by Adobe products and others. PSu works fine with Lightroom and Photoshop and most metadata migrate well between the two system.

Photolab 4 has just come out, and I'm looking to upgrade from version 3.3. It still uses .dop files for it's sidecars, but it now has an import function to read xmp files from the sources. First thing I checked was the ability for PL4 's metadata to pick up items such as Creator and copyright etc. PL4 has a simple editor to fill in these values, but I don't want to create yet another set of fields.

Did some testing here to see what is going on. Downloaded the latest exiftool to examine my Olympus raw files and their sidecars. Examining the xmp file created by PSu with notepad, the fields have been entered into the xmp file, but exiftool does not pick it up when opening the raw file. For example. Creator, Caption, Copyright fields are blank.

Perhaps I am doing something wrong in my import profile???

Dick

[Hert]

I'm not an ExifTool expert but afaik, ExifTool will not read metadata from a sidecar unless you tell it explicitly to load metadata from the XMP file itself.
If PhotoLab 4 is able to read XMP metadata for RAW files from the sidecar file (which the XMP standard requires) then you should be able to see PSU's metadata in DXO

[dickl]

Thanks Hert.

A few more tests this morning.

I "Shared" a RAW image to the desktop. A resized it to 800x600, and made sure all metadata was included in the jpg. Examined this jpg in exiftool. This time the PSu Creator and Copyright showed up in the metadata. Opened the PSu created jpg in PL4 - and this information was not shown.

PL4 allows you to enter copyright information in the image file, so I entered a test name (PL4) and copyright (Dick) from PL4 and exported it to a jpg on the desktop. This time I think I found a possible source of the conflict. PL4 puts the name in a tag called "Artist" and the Copyright in a field called "Copyright" whereas PSU puts the name in a field called "Creator" and a different field called "Copyright". I tried to find where this information was entered, but I could not find them in PSu detail...

Dick

[Hert]

First of all: always use one tool for metadata management or you’re up to the challenge of keeping things consistent.

Artist is an Exif tag. Creator is an XMP tag. Psu will always keep things in sync between all metadata levels. DXO is an editor and metadata is secundaire. If they write Exif’s artist and don’t correctly map that to XMP then you’ll be left with inconsistent metadata. Exactly why you should only use one tool.
Either way, PSU can fix what DXO forgot to do. Use right click - metadata - convert metadata to XMP. This will again convert lower levels of metadata to XMP. And artist will be brought to XMP again.
How you describe it, I highly recommend against using DXO for metadata changes. It will bring extra work for you. .

[dickl]

Ah... Thanks Hert for clearing that up!

I was aware of the need to stay with one metadata editor, and I have always maintained PSu as the boss. Even when I was using Lightroom, I always went back to Idimager/PSU to make metadata changes. I was wondering if I had made a wrong setting in Preferences that caused the metadata confusion.

Thanks for clearing that up. I will try your suggestion to convert metadata to xmp for this one test image for fun. It's no issue to me if PL4 doesn't see the fields filled by PSU... I know they are there and can be easily changed if needed.

Dick

[Mke]

As another DxO user, I'd also advise using DxO only for its strength - image processing - and use only PSU for all DAM functions.