Thank you - I know it’s been discussed at length in various places on the forum though I still find it hard to get my head round it.
Let me explain, my settings in PL are as follows:
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I import photos from my SD Card and make all my metadata changes in PM Plus to the original OOC Leica DNG (RAW) file. I have no interest in how either package handles changes to TIFF/ JPEG images. No extra XMP files are created, so all metadata must be embedded within the original RAW container.
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I edit the image in PL and a DOP file is created which contains those edits and some metadata. I have no interest in what metadata PL stores in either the DOP or the DB as long as PL makes no changes to what I’ve done already in PM, I make no metadata changes in PL and I get PL to display what it can (I’m not precious about how it interprets what it gets) by using “Read from Image”. I do not use “Write to Image”
From my research, I understand this should achieve what I want - metadata created and updated in PM (my single source of truth etc. etc.), embedded in the RAW file and unaltered by PL in any way whatsoever (in theory, if I hash the RAW file after it comes out of PM and once again after it comes out of PL it should be the same value - admittedly I’ve not tested this yet)
What confuses me is this part in the settings:
I have it ticked this way as it seems not to affect the metadata but the wording causes me a problem. Does this only relate to the edits and the reading and writing of DOP files (i.e. separate files) and the DB, or does it also include the embedded RAW data (commonly referred to as XMP sidecars) - if the latter, how does it differ from “sync”?