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[Doof]

Can somebody shed some light on what I may have done wrong?

I spent days organizing my pictures using my laptop (since my home PC was waiting for a new chipset fan).

I added a few custom fields : Picture Type, Virtual Albums, Sub Album 1, Sub Album 2, and Image Type. All of these were set to store in the tags.

I used these to organize all of my pictures. And, thankfully, based my file structure on those tags as well.

I just moved all of my images to my home PC tonight. I fired up MC with a completely new library, added all of those custom fields to my library, and imported all of my pictures. MC doesn't seem to be reading those tags. I can see them listed in File Type Info, but MC isn't matching them up to the fields I just added.

When I looked at the File Type Info, I notice that the tags are using underscores instead of spaces. So instead of Picture Type, Virtual Albums, Sub Album 1, Sub Album 2, and Image Type, I have Picture_Type, Virtual_Albums, Sub_Album 1, Sub_Album 2, and Image_Type.

So did I do something wrong? Or is this some limitation of MC not being able to properly handle spaces in custom field? A bug? I just want to make sure that I don't run into this problem again if I have to create a new library. I stored those fields in the tags for a reason. Thankfully, I'm able to rebuild my album structure using the Fill Properties from Filename tool, but it's kind of a pain, because not every file has a Sub Album 1 or Sub Album 2.

[Matt]

The underscores aren't a problem. (XML doesn't like spaces in names)

Could you email me a sample file? (matt @ jriver dot com)

Thanks.

[Doof]

Sent.

[Matt]

It works fine for me.

I created a library field "Image Type" and did an Update Library (from tags).  The data popped right in.

[Doof]

That must be the step I missed. I assumed that MC would do that update from tags part automatically like it seems to for the non-user fields. Like when it read the tags on import, it would fill in all of the fields.

Of course, now I got everything all filled in using the Fill Properties from Filename too. Guess I should have waited until you got back to me.

Thanks!

[Matt]

If you created the fields before the import, it'd get the info.

If you create the fields after the import, you need to manually tell it to update.

[Doof]

Hmm... I'm pretty certain I created the fields before the import. I did it specifically because I wanted all of those fields to fill in.

I'll play with it a little bit when I get home. It's not really a big deal right now, because I did get everything repopulated.

[Alex B]

I tried this with my custom fields. No problems here either.

Actually, since you started with a new library you could have restored a library backup. A backup includes all custom fields and configured view schemes (except the saved view presets, which are not a part of the database).

After that you could have used the Find and Replace tool for correcting the base path(s) if needed or alternatively you could have deleted the missing files and imported the correct files.