Sorry, I missed the last 24 hours of discussion on this topic (wrong TZ/other things going on).
@BHAYT - I saw your post PL4.3.6.32 Ghosting Ratings for Same image in different directories (Win10) - #73 by BHAYT, but I didn’t understand how you originally generated the dc:subject and hierarchical keywords in your examples (i.e., in which program(s)).
Regarding IMatch specifically, your findings don’t match what I see. I have a NEF raw image for which I used IMatch to add the hierarchical keyword ‘animals|mammals|bear|black bear’ (to the attached XMP sidecar, not the NEF). _DSC0388.xmp (7.5 KB) Note that IMatch records the hierarchical keyword as ‘animals|mammals|bear|black bear’ and dc.subject as:
dc:subject
rdf:Bag
rdf:lianimals</rdf:li>
rdf:limammals</rdf:li>
rdf:libear</rdf:li>
rdf:liblack bear</rdf:li>
</rdf:Bag>
This is as I would expect. Note especially that dc.subject generated by IMatch doesn’t include a hierarchical keyword, again as I would expect, but your example for IMatch showed otherwise. This is why I would like to see how you generated your examples.
I then processed the NEF in PL5. In its Metadata section, PL5 shows only ‘black bear’ in the Keywords tag. In the Keywords section, it shows:
animals
mammals
bear
black bear
I then did an ExifTool dump of the output jpg metadata (ExifTool dump of PL5 output jpg.txt (22.0 KB)
). The only keyword it contains is ‘black bear’ in [XMP-dc] Description (i.e., in dc-subject) and no reference to hierarchical keywords. As has been discussed elsewhere here, the hierarchical nature of the keywords has been completely lost in the output image. PL5 may retain these in its database for the raw NEF, but it’s disconcerting for it to have lost them in the output image! To do so seriously interferes with any efforts to comprehensively manage keywords.
[In addition, PL5 has added an entire Legacy IPTC section to the output file that did not exist in the original NEF/XMP! That’s a problem, although outside this discussion.]
@BHAYT - To recap, given the number of program you’re testing for metadata handling, it’s important to know the processing sequence(s) that you used in your examples, particularly the program(s) used to originally generate the data. I do appreciate the effort you’ve been putting into this.