XnView Software

I have some Python scripts which add IPTC Keywords to some of my photo files. When I open XNViewMP it normally picks up these keywords and associates the relevant categories with that photo (I can force this via View -> Update catalog from files). This has been working fine with no problems until yesterday. Now I am finding that XNViewMP joins the list of keywords into one single category.

For example, I have a file (which I can't attach, as at 4MB it is apparently too big) Eider007.tif, which has a tag list:

['SharpenAI', 'Wildlife', 'Wildlife|Birds', 'Wildlife|Birds|Eider']

(I have read/write heirarchical keywords enabled).

When I open XnViewMP and tell it to update the catalogue from the file, instead of adding this to the categories above, it creates a new category, "Wildlife,Birds,Eider" and assigns this.

This is XnView MP MacOSX
Version 0.99.6 64bits (Dec 10 2021)

Libformat version 7.99

The only thing that has changed of late is that I reinstalled py3exiv2, but that shouldn't have changed anything - and I tried restoring that from backup and it didn't change anything. I've also loaded some of my images into https://getpmd.iptc.org/upload just to check, and it confirms that the IPTC information I am embedding in the photos is correct, as a list of keywords as shown above.

Anyone have any ideas what I can do?

Thanks

Quick update - it *seems* to be working again now (famous last words).... I noticed that sometimes deleted tags were still appearing in the photos etc so I did so manual editing of the XnView.db file with sqlite3 from the command line to purge out missing files and clean up some duplicates, and, so far, things seem OK again....