How to create photos like "the masters", and is PhotoLab a useful tool?

The reason I outlined the renaming procedure that I did was because the DOP file holds a reference to the original file in the master version. On a Mac, if that name is not changed at the same time as the file names, PL5 will not be able to link the DOP to the appropriate original file.

Here are the four “name” tags from your DOP file after I renamed the virtual copies…

			…
			Name = "MM2_1484 | 2022-05-28.nef",
			…
			Name = "Virtual Copy 1.nef",
			…
			Name = "Virtual Copy 2.nef",
			…
			Name = "Joanna.nef",

The important one is the first one. This is the name of the original file and it is this that gets changed at the same time as the names of the NEF and DOP files when you rename the master in PL5.

The virtual copy names are not real files, they just follow the same naming convention as the master.

Unfortunately, Windows has always been an inferior operating system, with all sorts of things that don’t “just work” like macOS does.

Whatever you do, don’t even dream of changing your file naming convention just for the sake of posting examples here. Just use the workaround.