any more thoughts re. this?
To prevent Otto repeatedly overwriting my tags, I've turned off the update for external file changes option.
As was mentioned elsewhere, this is very early in development. All these comments are very welcome and helpful as we develop this further. In addition to reading IPTC, we are looking into reading other TAG formats--is everyone using IPTC these days, or do people use competing or superseeding standards? We are also planning to implement writing out the tags.
I have a lot of files with IPTC keywords. These have come from my quite lengthy liason with Elements, which saves its tags to file as IPTC keywords.
Captions written in Elements are saved to the IPTC caption field. I feel that MC should have its own default [Caption] field too. I don't think that hijacking the [comment] field is the correct solution.
Once I've imported all the existing IPTC tags and used them to give my migration to MC a serious leg-up, I won't have any further need for them.
MC could possibly write the tags out to files too? Now you're talking...
MC doesn't do DVD authoring, HTML slideshows, html email with the image in the email body etc. etc. (which is fine, for now)...
MC's excellent support for drag 'n' drop means that collating the files needed for a given project is simple, then a simple 'ctrl+a > drag 'n' drop' to a program such as proshow gold for DVD slideshow creation is all but seamless. Most, if not all, such programs will read IPTC info such as the caption field and use it for the project.
the time saved and convenience of having MC write its captions out to the IPTC caption field is plain to see.
If you can get this in, please do.
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Working out how to handle sync'ing of EXIF, IPTC, MJMD tags and the MC database is hurting my head!!! (too many different scenarios)
If there's no MJMD tag, EXIF and IPTC data is imported. When does an MJMD tag get written? I can only seem to get it to happen manually via the update tags from library tool.
Perhaps more choice is needed there?
Update library from > IPTC
Update library from > EXIF
Update library from > MJMD
For tag writing, perhaps setup precise rules, either hardcoded or optional, that tell MC which database fields should be saved in which metadata block, and when.
I don't know. I've never been much of an ideas man. Have you guys come up with anything yet?