Hi all
I hope some light can be thrown on this question?
I am trialling iMatch and the first thing I have applied is the Copyright Metadata Template. I have found out how update a test folder of image files OK.
My issue is when I open the same folder in PL6 and refresh the folder the new IPTC data is not being shown.
I surmise that I may be missing something obvious but cannot work out what???
TIA for any insights as to what I should be doing 
Providing that you have configured IMatch to update the images automatically successfully or forced the images to be updated, then the issue could be with the detection of the changes by PL6, i.e.
will cause PL6 to automatically detect any changes to the image metadata as per the following
PS:- This flag controls whether IMatch writes metadata updates back to the image automatically
and IMatch undertakes such operations as a background task so there can be a delay!
Many thanks Bryan
Your post was most welcome as reminder of what I had missed before.
Ticking
Made PL6 recognise the iMatch added/updated IPTC metadata
FWIW I have now bought iMatchâŚso the learning and usage curve continues 
@BoxBrownie and I just purchased the upgrade for IMatch!
Good Bryan, I just saw this after having downloaded iMatch for a testride. I just want do investigate an alternative to PhotoMechanic the day that might be of interest.
It has some nice features and is far more modern and graphical than PM but so far I also havenât seen really what I´m looking for in the form of the templates but that might be I have overlooked a few things.
One thing that surprised me is that it seems to support even other files than pictures - I mean Office Files and PDF-files e.t.c. I have tried for years to get Camera Bits to add a support like that even in Photo Mechanic but so far nothing has happened.
I think the iMatch-developers are a little smarter than the ones at Camera Bits in that regard since a wider file-support would broaden their market. Quite a few DAM-manufacturers have already walked that path with a lot of success to it.
So iMatch is more of a general DAM in that respect than PhotoMechanic. iMatch looks like a good alternative for smaller photobusinesses that have to handle even assets that are not just pictures.
@Stenis I bought IMatch some time ago but havenât really used it in âangerâ (i.e. for real). It has so many facilities that I find it hard to feel comfortable with and I do dislike the file import feature, possibly because I havenât used it sufficiently.
@jch2103 has been using it for a long time and may well be able to help you a lot better than I can, but I think the following might provide some clues as to where Templates can be set up, although IMatch frequently has more than one route to a feature.
Try a search such as âready made IMatch metadata templatesâ and the aforementioned @jch2103 can be found in a link there, i.e. Metadata Template
I will help if I can but I am still a novice with IMatch.
Regards
Bryan
Best of luck with the learning curve!
Do you currently use Photo Mechanic or Photo Mechanic Plus. If the former then all your metadata is found from the files themselves, image and sidecar, if the latter then a database is also involved?
If you switch to IMatch there is quite a bit of transfer work involved and how many templates you have for PM or PMP and how complicated they are only you know.
Iâve been very pleased with IMatch. It does have a learning curve, but itâs extremely flexible and it keeps improving, thanks to the developer and an active user community.
As @Stenis notes, IMatch handles far more than just images, in keeping with it being a full-fledged digital asset management program. Among other things, that makes it useful for document management and music collections.
Regarding metadata templates, the best thing I can do is point you to the on-line help system, especially the section on metadata templates: https://www.photools.com/help/imatch/md_templates.htm
If your image metadata is in the image files (and sidecar files), youâll find IM will easily ingest that metadata. And because you can point IM to your existing file/directory system, thereâs no need to be concerned about restructuring your files.
Iâm not sure what you want to accomplish with templates, but IM is flexible enough to handle almost anything (as @BHAYT mentioned, thereâs usually more than one way to accomplish a particular task). Youâll find that the user forum photools.com Community - Index is very helpful, including for newcomers. The online help is in a class far above that of most software.
One more thought: As noted, IM is extremely robust in handling metadata, but itâs entirely possible that as you ingest existing metadata, youâll find it isnât as consistent or reliable as you may have thought it was. IM has lots of tools for cleaning up these issues and ensuring that your image data is consistent.
Let me know if you have questions and donât hesitate to use the IM online resources.
Thanks for your input.
There is happening a lot of really strange things now around PM Plus. One is the pricing and the second is that the latest build of old version 6 seems totally fucked up and impossible to use.
So I will stick to the version I have that works fine for me.
I have never used the standard version of PM but both of them relies on the metadata in the files. The difference is that the metadata-indexdatabase gives us better and more efficient search and organizing facilities.
For now I have just tested iMatch for a few hours and I think I need a lot more to understand it. As you, I think I also find some of the features very different from my needs.
I reacted over the low price compared to the new prices of PhotoMechanic which are pretty insane.
A perptuel licence for iMatch cost 129 U$ which is 1477 SEK
A perpetual PM Plus licence will cost 5435 SEK which is 3,7 times more.
To subscribe for one year will cost 3391 SEK so it will be 2,3 times more expensive to subsribe for PM Plus one year than to buy a perpetual licence of iMach.
On top of that iMatch have som features PM Plus is lacking that might be valuable for some. So we will see but I guess some people will leave PM Plus in the longer run and migrate after a while but I see no reason to do so personally in the short run because it works so well as it is today with Photolab. I just feel a little bit sorry for CameraBits because I think they are doing a really tone deaf mistake here. I bought PM Plus for I think it was 199 U$ when it was realeased four years ago and that was for a perpetual licence with eternal updates that we already have had very many. A new perpetual licence will just give you updates for one year, so even that is a huge difference.
Even if migration always takes some efforts migrating XMP-based software too quite a lot of the job will be done just reindexing with the new software. In the test I just did most of the metadata from PM Plus will appear in iMatch after converting and the rest will be visible when adding the missing fields in iMatch manually ⌠and changes done in PM with the batch tools seems to appear also in iMatch, so that seems to work.
Thanks for your input!
I want to use templates as i do in PM Plus to cunduct batch updates. Here PM really shines and is extremely efficient and flexible.
I know iMatch has a partly different approach with a use of more AI and automatic tagging e.t.c. but I am pretty reluctant using that for the keywords. I rather do that with a controlled vocabulary myself with the PM templates and I hope I will be able to do that in iMatch too if necessary but here I feel I need to see these possibilities in action too. Seeing is believing!
Thanks for the links. Shall be interesting.
I read the link about building templates and I think it looks promising and doable. I also have to look into using variables, since I am used to use these extensively in PM Plus templates.
So thank you again! It was very helpful!
One last question:
What about the productivity??
If I as a user NOT using autotagging?
How is iMatch performing then?
PM Plus is in every inch about max productivity.
Every single metadata maintenance function is optimized and some polished for more than 20 years. I love it because it is a really pro software
So is Capture One that also have been very focused on productivity last years.
Photolab though - not that much.
Photolabs main selling point has been image quality instead and that is fine for me too.
You see normally I havenât really cared before about what a highly productive software cost IF it does the job as extremely effective as PM Plus does, because it saves valuable time and Iâm 75 in february. So that us essential for me.
⌠BUT what I can see now when both Capture One and PM both have gone subscription is extreme raises in prices both and especially for the perpetual licenses that also have seen a decline when it comes to support of maintainence upgrades that in the case of C1 have schrunk to a minimum.
I have 70 000 pictures in my two archives today - almost 20 000 developed and tagged and without PM I would not even have bothered.
Many years ago I started to add metadata in Lightroom but gave up because it was so ineffective and cumbersome.
Today I think I see an ever increasing benefit of having a digital picture archive that really works very effectively and finally I feel I have taken total control over my former mess that I hardly even wanted to think of before.
I will see what I do but every software company seems to look in the same direction and if I will have to face say between 5 and 10 really expensive subscriptions than I just will be better off buying perpetual licenses of C1 and PM Plus. C1 at least have a loyalty program that after 5 years gives a free perpetual and reduces the price of it with 20% per year you have subscribed.
PM Plus seems to get nothing of that.
Can you clarify how you define autotagging and what you expect from it?
Well, it can be everything from human faces to reverse lookup of geodata to autokeywording. Especially the last thing I will never use if I can prevent it. Even reverse lookup of geodata can be a problem. We have reverse lookup even in PhotoMechanic and I have tried it but never taken it in production since it produce so voluminous and unpredictable results. When I tried to use it on some plaves in western Afghanistan it was written in pashto so the language and even characters it
is written with will be a problem when I have standardadized in English. I also handle mobile pictures and since my mobile has a Swedish interface I don´t want any Swedish tags either in my picture-metadata. Open up for the use of whatever is autotagged by various devices and softwares will be a very good recepie for a total metadata soup.
So to sum up and answer your question: I expect nothig less than a total mess of all the work I have put into building my archive the last four years if I open for AI-tagging or semi-manual reverse lookup in either PM Plus or iMatch or any other system really. The only way for me to handle thus is by using and sticking to the vocabulary I use.
IMatch offers several API choices for reverse geocoding. All require a signup, and some, like Google, Bing and HERE have plans that include a free monthly usage quota. How well it would work for your use case depends on your requirements and expectations. I generally use Google, which has usually returned good (usable/consistent) results for the US, Australia, Japan and Europe. The specific results do tend to vary depending on the country (differing national standards for defining things like âcountryâ, âstateâ, âcityâ and âlocationâ), but itâs been âgood enoughâ for me to keep images organized (and makes it easy to find locations like 'Kyoto).
Face recognition options work reasonably well given the inherent difficulties involved and record face data in a standard metadata format so itâs accessible to other programs that follow metadata standards. And itâs all local to your computer (nothing is sent to the cloudâŚ). But again, totally optional for the user. (I just use it for family members.)
IM supports a thesaurus with controlled vocabulary, of course.
IM allows AI lookups of different kinds, but itâs entirely optional and configurable (Iâve mostly ignored it so far).
Etc.
@Stenis There is a lot in the product and it will take time to work out what parts are appropriate for you as a PM Plus replacement and what parts might offer features of use in the future.
It could be worth continuing your experiments with the trial copy and even extending the trial with a licence to work out how it might fit with your current and future needs.
I purchased it when it was on a Christmas offer some years ago when I was testing DxPL keywording and donât regret that purchase but I need to make a real effort to learn to use it more effectively.
Sorry I havenât replied earlier but our youngest son and his wife have a film, âThe Assessmentâ, for which they wrote the bulk of the script, being presented in the BFI London Film Festival.
So my wife was on âbabyâ sitting duty on Monday when they were attending its first showing in London, it was first publicly shown at the Toronto Film Festival.
Then on Friday night she was âteenagerâ sitting for our oldest son and his wife who had to attend a 40 year anniversary for a company for which she does the PR.
So I was travelling to London to meet up with my wife, her sister and our son and daughter in law (and her father) to see the second showing of the film in London at the Curzon Mayfair.
It was well worth the train journey to London, which I have not done for many years. I would probably have said that even if it wasnât a particularly good film, but it was.
I must repeat the journey with my camera and wander the streets of a place, much changed in parts, that I worked in for years.
Wow, good luck to your son and his wife with their creative work.
I might follow your advise and drill down a lot more in the details of IM:s features after buying it. I might as well test it for my textfiles too. I really feel I need a backup plan despite I probably will be able to use PMPlus in this version as long as I wish. I still use Office Pro 2007 without any problems so far. It is not because Iâm particularly stingy but why mending a working item or buying some new that wonât add anything that I donât need. I have nothing to gain of starting an Office-subscription really as long as my perpetual Office 2007 works.
I have never been to London and when I was young my focus first was Asia and the Middle- East and later Afrika and South-America. Europe I thought I could see when I got older. So last two years I have even travelled in Spain which I learned to hate the two times earlier I visited it. Both times my liggage was lost - the first time in Madrid and the second in Barcelona. That has never happened even in Afrika despite I have visited south os the equator eight times and Morocco four.
⌠and in Barcelona it wasnât just mine. For every plane that landed the queu of unlucky grew and the lady behind the desk gave up and sighed: âDonât blame me, Iâm from Cubaâ.
Iâm not worse than I can admit that the last trips - both to Andalucia - were fantastic. So my Spanish âdiceaseâ seems to be cured.
Hi again!
I have been reading a little about what they seems to work with now concerning AI adding of Descriptions/Captions and Keywords and it is both kind of impressive and fearsome.
[Official] Whatâs Berewing for IMatch 2024 / 2025. You will like this!
Look at this example below of this is thought to work in iMatch 2025.
photools.com/bin/imatch-ai-2-001.mp4
As we can see the keyword-field will get totally contaminated of a chattering AI without reasonable control seemingly high on some sort of central stimulant. Some good though is that it is an active action needed to get it writing it to the pictures.
Very important: âTo make things easier to see in @Keywords, the test app produces keywords under the common root keyword AI.â I would expect the developer to continue this when the update is released. Will be interesting to see what develops, but all of this should be completely optional.
I have done a lot of testing now and also tested to migrate my keyword vocabulary. I´m really impressed of iMatch and how competent it really is. It took me some time to understand how to batch update the metadata because it really works very differently from PM Plus. In PM it is always about templates and so called snapshots which in fact always uses the âMetadata Templateâ as a base where I can activate or deactivate the fields/elements I want to affect. In iMatch you always starts with the selection of pictures and add data to the active template and when I use the Default-template it covers all but one of the about 20 fields I use to use. So that is fine for me really.
I Match has a default hierarchic âThesarus/Vocabularyâ that I am not interested in since I use a flat structure. I could not find a way to import my vocabulary from PM Plus but that is still fine, because iMatch have a way to add all the keywords used on the pictures to the Thesarus called âImport from databaseâ. A click on that gets iMatch to add all keywords used on the Pictures to the Thesaurus/Vocabulary. It first creates a mess but that is really easy to clean up since the hierachic keywords top level are not all that many and can easily be spotted (since they are color marked), selected and deleted, so even this is no problem.
In summary, I believe migrating to iMatch from PM Plus should be relatively straightforward the way I use PM. However, there is one aspect that concerns me:
I havenât yet found a way to like in PM Plus âOpen a selection of picturesâ in PM Plus automatically with Photolab. Do you know how to do that? ⌠because that is the way I integrate Photolab with PM and not being able to do that is almost a show stopper for me.
I think it looks really good so far. Also nice with a little more modern interface than the one PM Plus have even if that interface is really efficient.
You just need to create a Favorite for Pl (see the Help for details, esp. about using a shortcut for 64-bit programs). Once youâre done that, select the images in IM that you want to process, click the Favorite shortcut and Pl will open them in a new Pl Project. Thatâs very convenient if youâre processing just a few images in a folder.
Iâm glad the learning curve is progressing smoothly.
Thanks, now that worked too!
So far I have just one slightly negative thought. When i update say a couple of houndred pictures it gets really slow. I can sit there for five minutes and wainting getting pretty impatient. I never get that kind of feeling with PM Plus.
I also think some of the funtions that has to be rigged are pretty uneducational the way they are built. It feels a little like Capture One before they realized that they had do things more efficient.
Besides that I think iMatch is really a very competent and interesting software but the learning curve is pretty steep - nothing wrong with that when it is a complete DAM we are talking about- it is just to read the documentation and watch the videos that are very helpful.
@Stenis I originally used IMatch to interact with DxPL via keyword changes and did the same with other software including PM. For the testing I was doing the delays in IMatch were way more than any other software.
The reason, I believe, is because the author of the software was trying to avoid potential issues between other software and IMatch and has adopted an asynchronous process for undertaking certain functions. Some delays have been built into the product to avoid potential record lock clashes.
To be honest I have used software without any such mechanism and never run into a problem but that is the way that IMatch has been built.
With respect to the passing of images to other programs I found I had created Favourites (âFavoritesâ), or IMatch had created them for me (?) but I cannot find out how to add to the list, and I have looked for documentation that explains exactly that and havenât found details in any âHelpâ text?!?
