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[marko]

I'm hoping that v12 will bring the likes of thumbnail size sliders, preservation, creation and edit of EXIF data. I find it harsh that after editing a file using MC's image editor, all tags are lost, including the files date. It's harsh because MC, by design, uses the files date to fill the [album] field. this is a very neat feature that allows us to quickly search for groups of files based around their [album] tags. Editing files using MC's internal editor causes the album tag to be changed to the date the file was saved, which in turn orphans that file from the rest of its group. At the moment, I find MC a competant image organiser, but use other software for editing to safeguard original file and tags.

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I assume you mean EXIF tags are lost, not MC's library or internal JPG tags.  Please start a thread with details.  This shouldn't be happening.  MC reads EXIF tags but doesn't write them.  It stores a tag in the JPG header in a location devoted to MC's use, but according to the JPG standard.  I believe PhotoShop does something similar.

No, I mean all tags are lost. Well, perhaps not quite all....
the data is still in the library database. all of it except for the [album] tag and the [name], which have been automatically replaced with the edited files' date and time of creation, and the actual filename, respectively.

You can see this very easily...
right click an image file (for the full effect, make it one where you've changed the default [album] and [name] fields.)
go to: "image > edit image.."
make a change (I used the crop tool)
on the editor menu, click "File > Save"
close the editor

now, open the filetype info window and the tag info window.
click away from, then back to, the edited image to refresh the windows in case they were already open.


if you then check the tag info window you should notice that all other database entries are saved except for [album], [name] and date/time of creation.

and this shot shows the net result as MC overwrites both the name field and the album field....


if I press F5, the selected image will be dropped from this view, meaning that I need to go track this file down to correct its tags, and so return it to its rightful group.
of course, by the time I realised this was happening, my library was a riddled with orphan images whose library tags had been altered, and whose file tags had been removed, just by cropping an image, or removing some red eye using MC's editor.
It took a long time to repair my library. I was a little miffed at having permanantly lost the original date and time of some photos becuase of this, and is the reason why I won't use MC's internal editor at this time.

[GHammer]

Took one original jpg with EXIF data.

Opened it in MC 11.1.089
Rotated the image right.
Saved the image.
All EXIF data is gone, and the file date is changed.
Made quite a difference in file size and I'd expect quality too.

Performed the same change with a different tool.

The EXIF, time and date, and quality were all preserved.

[marko]

image rotation using the "rotate left" and "rotate right" commands found on the image tools menu is lossless. MC changes the exif x&y co-ordinates to rotate the image.

the problems with tags arises when saving files via the image editor.

[GHammer]

image rotation using the "rotate left" and "rotate right" commands found on the image tools menu is lossless. MC changes the exif x&y co-ordinates to rotate the image.

the problems with tags arises when saving files via the image editor.

This was done via the image editor.
No tags were changed in my example. Just rotate, save.

[JimH]

Is the problem only with the Image Editor?

If you right click on an image in MC and rotate it, does that work as expected?

[GHammer]

Is the problem only with the Image Editor?

If you right click on an image in MC and rotate it, does that work as expected?

That works fine, no EXIF data is lost. File date/time is changed, but that is easy to restore from EXIF if I want to.

So, looks like the editor.

[marko]

yes. the problem is with the image editor, at least, it is for me.

if I just need to rotate an image, I'll happily use the rotate command. Crops and red-eye fixes need to be done externally, which leads to a thumbnail refresh problem.

[JimH]

Thanks for the detail.  That explains why we couldn't reproduce it.

We'll get it fixed. 

[Matt]

The image editor doesn't support EXIF tags in v11.  We may add this to v12.

Thanks Marko.

[marko]

The image editor doesn't support EXIF tags in v11.  We may add this to v12.

great news.

so, my understanding is that we'll get <MJMD> tag support for v11.1 for sure, and maybe some exif support in v12.?

[marko]

sadly, it looks as though 11.1 will ship with this bug. the crop and red eye tools were very handy indeed but I won't use them. I could use them, and want to use them, but having to remember to fix the album field, then update tags from library on every file I save, or have a chunk of my image library work slowly undone over time, is too much for me.

It's not quite a show stopper, but it's as close to one as you'll ever be for me. I was quite enjoying the handiness of the image editor before I realised what it was doing, and by that time, the corrosion was pretty extensive and took a while to repair.

Is it likely that this issue will be addressed in the near future? (near future is kind of vague, I'll take as precise an answer as you can give me)

Just so we're clear, the loss of the exif data is accepted for now, it's a shame, but accepted nonetheless. What I see as the bug is the fact that MC does not preserve its own <MJMD> tags. It really surprised me when I discovered the bug, I never imagined for a moment that MC would destroy it's own metadata.

To give you an idea of what I was doing:
I had set up flags such as needs cropping and fix red eye. Often, when viewing image albums with friends or family, I'd spot one or more that needed attention. rather than interupt the viewing, I'd quickly tag it and move on. Later, if I found myself at a loose end, I'd pull those tagged images together via a smartlist and set about them. edit, save, remove tag, on to the next one... it wasn't till much later that I realised some of my albums had become very fragmented indeed, and rounding up the missing files was a nightmare because the filedates had all been overwritten too.

[Alex B]

Since the Image Editor decompresses the image and writes a new file it works otherwise correctly but the library database should be able to apply the previous MJMD tags to the new image in case the old file is replaced with the saved file.

Currently it works like the file was edited with an external editor behind MC's back.

BTW, I wouldn't edit my original camera jpg files because resaving a jpg file is always a lossy procedure. If I must edit the original images (because of red eyes etc.) I always save the edited images in a lossless format like tiff for avoiding further quality loss.

[Matt]

Next build:
Changed: After editing an image, MC will save the previous tags into the updated file. (if you "Save As..." instead, tags will not be transferred)