Feature request : Categories and IPTC data

[Infernoweb]

Hi !

I'm a long time user of classical XnView software and I'm enjoying the MP software. Great job and thank you very much for this amazing tool !

I'm using latest 0.61 version on Windows 7 x64. I browsed my photo collection already IPTC tagged by classical XnView. All IPTC keywords have been added in category database and it helps me to find a lot of mistakes I made for some keywords (mostly bad inputs). I expected to be able to delete these bad keywords by simply deleting the corresponding category. But this is clearly not the case.

Has this feature ever been requested or scheduled? If not, it would gain a considerable time for processing IPTC.

By example :
A set of photos have "keyword1" as one of the IPTC keywords. "keyword1" is available as a category in the database.
If I want to remove it from the related set, it would be fine to simply delete the category "keyword1" from database to perform the deletion from the photos.

What do you think of this idea? Is it doable?

[m.Th.]

What do you think of this idea?

A standard feature of the planned Catalog.

Is it doable?

Sure.

Short analysis:

While (as you perhaps saw) the changes (deletion in your case) in the Database (where the Catalog resides) are very fast, the changes on the disk (as you can imagine) are very slow.

Also, another very important thing to note is that the areas where we need this thing is usually the 'white' area (our collection, our archive) which is characterized by relative stability, in contrast with the 'black' area (eg. the photos which we want to see now and then - some photos which we downloaded from web, our temp dir, wallpapers, email attachements etc.) which is highly volatile.

That's why we need an on-demand asynchronous link between database and the disk.

This is usually implemented by some options in the right click menu of the file list source. (Catalog, Category Tree, Thumbs Pane etc.)

When the user right-clicks a folder node from the catalog a popup menu will appear which, aside of the gazilion of options related to Catalog and On-Disk management of the said node, we will have the following menu entries:

• Update XMP/IPTC info from the Catalog
• Update the Catalog from the XMP/IPTC info
• Synchronize Catalog with the XMP/IPTC info

...Of course, these commands should be available also in the Thumbs Pane - which is especially useful when one selects a range of thumbnails.

These options are very important. Some programs have big, special buttons for syncing metadata (Lightroom) while others have by default shortcuts assigned to these commands (IDImager).

The tricky part is only the last option (Synchronize Catalog with the XMP/IPTC info) which must rely on the comparison of the date of the last metadata change which, at the time of writing, isn't present for the Catalog part.

However, I think that for the time being it will be a great gain to implement a least the first two options: push metadata from Catalog to Disk and pull it from Disk to Catalog.

Also, these two engines (push and pull metatada from/to disk) should be detached from the filelist builder because, as I said, the file list can come from:

• the current selection from the Thumbs Pane
• the selected folder node from the Catalog
• the selected note from the Categories Tree (a rating, color or a category - in fact, this was the OP's request)

Just my2c & HTH

[Infernoweb]

Thx for this great news.

If you need some testers, I'm ready: I've a set of around 200 pictures with a bad IPTC keyword to remove. To do this manually would be tiresome and it is not conceivable.

[m.Th.]

Thx for this great news.

If you need some testers, I'm ready: I've a set of around 200 pictures with a bad IPTC keyword to remove. To do this manually would be tiresome and it is not conceivable.

I'm not the developer.

I'm just a simple outsider which just happens to be around here.

...but also I hope that Pierre will fix this and will ask for our help.