label duplication in "Miscellaneous" category

[Stephen]

I would not delete miscellaneous labels until they are filed correctly. Personally, I would prefer to be able to find 'dog' in miscellaneous rather than no find it at all because the label has been deleted. When it is later filed correctly under animals, even better.

A long time ago there was a suggestion in Mantis about marking the labels filed under miscellaneous with a coloured band or stripe to more easily differentiate them. It apparently did not find much support at that time but I still think it would be a great improvement.

[fbungarz]

A long time ago there was a suggestion in Mantis about marking the labels filed under miscellaneous with a coloured band or stripe to more easily differentiate them. It apparently did not find much support at that time but I still think it would be a great improvement.

I disagree strongly !!!
A great improvement would be if PSu no longer were to generate these idiotic labels and i would not routinely have to delete them.
I have no idea how and why this happens. They are ALWAYS duplicates or labels that already exist and occur in the right place. Why they are being duplicated again and again and again and again... no idea.

[Hert]

Didn’t we come to the conclusion that this occurs when you have delimited (opposed to hierarchical) keywords in the metadata?

[Mke]

Didn’t we come to the conclusion that this occurs when you have delimited (opposed to hierarchical) keywords in the metadata?

Personally I've had a few cases where images with only hierarchical keywords have ended up in Miscellaneous. But so few and so infrequently that it's never bothered me.

[Stephen]

A long time ago there was a suggestion in Mantis about marking the labels filed under miscellaneous with a coloured band or stripe to more easily differentiate them. It apparently did not find much support at that time but I still think it would be a great improvement.

I disagree strongly !!!
A great improvement would be if PSu no longer were to generate these idiotic labels and i would not routinely have to delete them.
I have no idea how and why this happens. They are ALWAYS duplicates or labels that already exist and occur in the right place. Why they are being duplicated again and again and again and again... no idea.

I agree that this is a problem which possibly has different underlying causes and naturally it would be better if that problem did not occur. The suggestion to distinctly mark the labels appearing in the miscellaneous category would at least flag them and enable an easily visible need for deletion or re-allocation. It's a workaround for a recurring problem.

[fbungarz]

Didn’t we come to the conclusion that this occurs when you have delimited (opposed to hierarchical) keywords in the metadata?

Nope, I long abolished those and the Miscellaneous labels still keep popping up...
Of course, I do hope that re-writing the keywords for thousands of files from delimited to hierarchical actually worked. On your recommendation (and after some discussion on the forum) I decided to change and re-write metadata again to all my files. That was more than two years ago and thus should long have been taken care of.

[Stephen]

Re Stephen:

Maybe you could try to revoke assigned labels and save data to file before cascading them. Not sure as I don't cascade.

It is possible to just delete all labels under Miscellaneous and that removes only the duplicates, not the original, correctly placed ones.
Still it is a bit of a nuisance and I'd prefer if duplication would not happen in the first place rather than having to regularly delete these redundant labels ...

Frank, this happens to me the whole time when using an external editor. I use Capture One. After editing I always mark the RAW files yellow and then export them as jpg. On import into PSu I always delete all of their labels and save to file. They are still marked yellow. Then I put them alongside the original RAW files and mark each pair or RAW and jpg. I then add the missing labels and save.

It is a work around and avoids adding more labels to the misc category. It is certainly not ideal and it is also time consuming, but it works for me. I think it is probably faster than it would be to change the labels in misc on a rainy day (or month!)

[jstartin]

I have spent several hours (wet afternoon!) exploring a hunch about what might cause this by writing metadata to file for multiple clones of a jpeg file using different write preferences for each clone, and then importing the files into a series of different experimental catalogs with different read preferences.

It turns out that keywords may be converted to labels in the Miscellaneous category regardless of whether they are in XMP as hierarchical subject or as delimited keywords in subject.

The conditions that cause this seem to be that the proper category does not already exist in the catalog AND ICS xmp does not exist, does not properly represent the label hierarchy needed (is left out of date by using other tools), or is not read because of preference settings in synchronise/read.

I think this can be summarised by saying that PSu "dumps" things in Miscellaneous if it is not given enough information to do anything else. I rather think that this a proper response to an ill-considered workflow, but I expect there are other points of view!

[fbungarz]

Thanks for the sleuthing, but I am not convinced that the scenario you describe is correct - unless something does not actually work as advertised...

As I pointed out, I have long disabled delimited keywords and since then the metadata to all files have repeatedly been updated. So, I agree using delimited vs. hierarchical keywords cannot be at the root cause of this (unless re-writing metadata to all of my files does not actually work properly, which would be a complete disaster - why using PSu at all if I cannot trust it to update metadata correctly).

However, you write, keywords are dumped into Miscellaneous, if:
(1) ... the proper category does not already exist ...
This is not the case either. In my case all the files that miraculously create these Miscellaneous keywords are ALL derivatives of files that already have their correct keywords assigned and these are all correctly assigned to a particular category within PSu...
(2) ... AND ICS xmp does not exist, does not properly represent the label hierarchy needed ...
Well, that *may* be the case, but why? Why would PSu even bother about ICS if READING of ICS is typically disabled in Preferences (as it should be; ICS is meant to be designed to re-create a catalog from the metadata embedded within the files; it must be ignored in all other instances, especially so if reading ICS is DISABLED!)
(3) ... or is not read because of preference settings in synchronise/read ...
Which particular setting are you referring too? And again: why would this matter ???

In my particular scenario, these "Miscellaneous keywords" only pop-up for files saved outside PSu and imported to the database via "Verify folders for missing files..."

Here is what I do:
(1) open a file from within PSu in Photoshop or Affinity.
(2) modify it in Photoshop or Affinity and save it with the same file name, but adding a file naming mask, e.g. *_print.jpg or *_edited.jpg
(3) in PSu use "Verify folders for missing files..." to add the file(s) to PSu database, versioning enabled so the derivative files are added to their respective version (print vewrsion, edited version)

Now - what happens when I use "Verify folders for missing files..." is this:
The dialog box that pops up tells me that there are "missing" metadata, which is of course nonsense! The files all should have the same metadata as the ones they were derived from (the same metadata as the version set they belong to)!
Therefore I ALWAYS click to ignore these "missing" metadata and ONLY import the new derivative images. This usually works fine, the correct version is assigned, BUT for some reason now quite frequently (not always!) existing keywords for the version sets get duplicated under "Miscellaneous". Deleting these keywords does not delete the correctly placed original ones.

I can only *assume* that during the verify-import PSu does not ignore the erroneous keywords that somehow were saved to the file by Photoshop or Affinity. Why these applications even mess with the metadata, I wouldn't know, but apparently they do and then PSu *thinks* keywords were modified outside PSu (which they should not have been!). In any case - disabling import/update of these "stray" keywords would mean PSu ignores them. Somehow it doesn't...

So, typically, what I now do: after verify, check if "Miscellaneous keywords" were erroneously generated, delete them all, cascade the original keywords from the main version into all subversions (including the ones just imported via verify).

It is just one of those bugs that are irritating, but can be resolved fairly easily by some routine "Miscellaneous keyword" deleting. I guess, that bug would probably have been resolved by now, if PSu wasn't simply too complex.