as I have said in my previous posts - only available since PL9.6 
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That’s what a forum is there for, for users to help one another understand the issues and for someone to step in with clarification when a user has missed something.
You in this case, Dave. Well done, apart from the knuckle whack with the ruler.
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Uncoy - CH Photo has accepted my comment that was directed to him and as far as I’m concerned that’s the end of it, so why can’t you accept this as well - especially as you marked CHPhoto’s response to myself accepting my comment with a 
thumbs up emogi?
You state that the forum is here for “users to help one another understand the issues and for someone to step in with clarification when a user has missed something.”
Totally agree with you, … but what clarification or further understanding is your comment to myself bringing to this discussion?… or have I missed something here?
Baffled as to why you have also marked my response to CHPhoto confirming to him that the features in PL9 that we were discussing were only introduced with the release of PL9.6 with a 
open mouthed emogi?? It’s just a simple statement of fact.
Why make a post when you have nothing to add to the conversationand when a simple thumbs up emogi liking my response would have sufficed?
I have nothing further to add that would enhance or clarify this conversation, so please don’t bother to respond to me or the forum on this - it would only be another post made for the sake of making another post to the forum.
DH
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As for me, I won’t be able to leave Lightroom and photoshop without having HDR Merge, Panorame Merge and Focus stacking in PL. I do not want to have to use external softwares for at least the 2 merge ones. I do have PL 6 and will not upgrade until those features are implemented.
Then you already use two softwares… As I’m doing, DxO PL 9 for most cases, Affinity Studio for HDR merge, Panorama, focus stacking and filters and “special effects.”
The functions will probably never be in PhotoLab.
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You may have to wait a long time time for those features.
Mark
I tried Shinestacker (free) for my first focus stack just last weekend. It worked extremely well!
I’ve used both Hugin (free) and AutoPano Giga (free) for panoramas and both worked extremely well.
I don’t often do HDR and when I last did I used Luminar but no longer have access (although I do have an old Aurora HDR license if that still works).
I do not expect PhotoLab to get those features. Certainly not all three within, say, the next 5 years.
The consensus I have seen in several places is multi-image processing is generally “average” at best in the photo processing apps. Dedicated tools are the way to go for control and quality.
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of course - if those are to be implemented ( ever ) by DxO they will be an extra paid app ( in addition to filmpack and viewpoint ) - not in PhotoLab … nothing personal, just business …
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I doubt that will ever happen. Both iMatch and PhotoMechanic as two examples has been developed and polished for more than 20 years to reach the levels they are at presently. Like Mario Westphal sometimes has written - building a DAM is not easy and if you see how complex a state of the art DAM like iMatch is today you will understand how much of structural growth that will take. Photolab has a long way to walk to be even close.
Look at Photolab today and even PhotoMechanic, they have not even managed to implement the present XMP metadata standard properly yet. They are still stuck there in the IPTC swamp. They can start there and so can Capture One too. They all have a lot to learn before they reach that level of matureness as you find in a state of the art tool like iMatch today.
I don’t understand this talk of not willing to use a thirdparty DAM as a scalable option to the DXO option. Why is that?
Have tried it? The integration is seamless. Just configure a so called Favourite in iMatch. It is configured just by drag and drop of a Windows Photolab shortcut and a selection of a F-button in Windows. In my system i just press F3 for Favourite and F3 once more for opening a selection in iMatch instantly in Photolab. Pressing F3+F2 opens Topaz Open AI 4 when i need to sharpen and denoise my old reproprocessed color slides that Photolab just can’t handle properly.
Photolab has a unique advantage both C1 and Lightroom lacks in working straight on the filesystem and instead of using a database and opening a selection as some kind of cumbersome project it has unique feature in the External Search-feature that instantly opens any selection you previously have done without having to redo the whole process. Compare for example C1 and you will understand.
If you have both Photolab and iMatch opened simultaneously this process is lightning fast and it solves the problems Photolab has to handle libraries with say some thousand pictures today.
IMatch is perpetual like Photolab too and compared to what you gain in productivity by using the state of the art Autotagger AI-support for generating both Descriptions and Keywords of high quality 137 dollars is nothing.
Even Lightrooms picture library is a joke compared to what especially iMatch can offfer today and another thing that really stands out in the competition is how it handles keywords with AI and controlled vocabularies. I have seen nothing like anywhere else and even PhotoMechanic is a joke in that respect. I used PhotoMechanic four-five years so I think I can say that with proper shoes on my feet.
The strength when it comes to the AI-support is that it also gives us a very broad choice of both cloud based AI API to choose between and those who hate AI because they suspect Google or Open AI will “steal their immaterial properties” can relax because there are plenty of options to run local AI-models that lives on your own computer - IF you can afford a GPU powerful enough for that task. Many today doesn’t seem to really understand the difference between those two main options - which is a source of confusion.
The same openess goes for the Map-systems used for “Reverse lookup of location data”. Even there we have options to Google like HERE for the lookups and it is possible even to use Google for the lookup and choose OpenStreetMaps for the maps too. That is a freedom the users of PhotoMechanic just can dream of. I wish more photo-software companies would give us better options than most of them do today. If a company like DXO hade offered that with Photolab 9, we would never had ended up in the mess we ended up the half year that followed on the release in September. We would just have picked some other models than the ones DXO offered at that time.
The only thing you really need to do to get the metadata updates to get instantly replicated from iMatch to the database in Photolab is to turn on “Synchronizing” in the Preferences in Photolab and make sure you have opened Photolab with the same image folder as you are working on in iMatch. The synch is absolutely rock solid of you never maintain any metadata in Picture Library. One master - no disaster.
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Assuming this ever happens I would not expect support of this type for quite some time. I think you will find that there will be an increased emphasis on AI masking and a growing number of AI assisted features over the next few years. perhaps even including a generative erase tool.
Mark
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@mwsilvers - Yes and that is exactly as it should be because that way we get the most powerful combo there is to find today on the market. All “all in one”-RAW-converter solutions are in some respect sub-par compromises but sticking to the core functions of Photolab that is state of the art when it comes to technical picture quality and add a state of the art DAM abolishes that compromises and scales the whole system to a whole different level of performace even when it comes to work flow efficiency.
Not everybody will feel they will need that and will still be happy with an integrated DAM like the one in Photolab and that is fine too but no other RAW- converter that I know has an option to scale like Photolab and tyat will appeal to some high end users serious about building a high end DAM. And compared to what people are prepared to spend on photo hardware, the cost for iMatch just can’t be a serious issue. So this really boils down to if you really need it or not.
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Excellent analysis. I have long thought that rather than trying to develop, what you rightly describe as a very tough problem, DXO should reach out to IMATCH and cooperate with them to improve interoperability. For example does IMATCH display the DXO edited thumbnail or just the one from the original raw file?
DXO have nothing to lose and everything to gain from such cooperation and would make DXO more competitive for those that need a DAM.
With properly configured automatic versioning in IMatch, this happens automatically as well (the version created with DxO can then automatically become the visual proxy). As far as I’m concerned, the integration between IMatch and Photolab is currently as good as it gets. And if any problems arise, IMatch’s excellent support is there to help.
Just to be clear, so that I can promote DXO/IMATCH, are you saying can see the impact of adjusting the sliders in Photolab in IMATCH thumbnail without having to export a file eg a jpg?
In other words you see in IMATCH exactly the same as you see in DXO PhotoLibrary.
Good thing you asked. It doesn’t work without exporting. I export processed images to iMatch using an export preset (to the same directory or a subfolder), and iMatch then recognizes the exported JPG as a version of the RAW image and uses it as the preview image (called a “visual proxy” in iMatch).
Thanks, that’s what I expected. All DXO have to do is get in touch with IMATCH and give them the algorithm for linking the original file with the previews stored in the cache file. These previews are what we see in DXO PhotoLibrary and then IMATCH could display them. This is really a win-win for DXO and IMATCH. DXO gain a top DAM system that is actually better than Lightroom and IMATCH, as the official partner of DXO, become the de-facto choice for a DAM.
Somebody point this out to DXO, although I fear the “not invented here” syndrome, even though they haven’t anything within light years of IMATCH. 
Precisely my stance. DXO and Photools ought to work together. I hade suggested they offer a bundle to Mario Westphal but it did not happen so far. If they did they would have a better chance to take on Adobe.
Imatch is rendering its own previews
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No, and that is the case in all the converters I have used and all the third part DAM-systems too. The thing is that no other program than Photolab understands the impact of Photolabs sliders on our RAW.
Imatch DAM
PhotoMechanic DAM
as usual, resurrecting : AutoWB and in-camera AutoWB for those models that make it available ( because it might naturally differ from As Shot WB , some camera models do write AutoWB setting always in raw files )
Yes, that’s always been the case but the DXO-Photolab adjusted previews are available and all IMATCH needs is the mapping between the original file and DXO’s preview.