This stance is quite rude. Bryan went to a lot of trouble to run a lot of real world tests on this data and to even more trouble to share them with us. The reason both @John-M and especially @BHAYT posts are so long is that PhotoLab’s handling of metadata is too complicated.
John seems to be right (in my experience) that image processing data does travel reliably in .dop sidecars. On the other hand, where the metadata is stored and whether it is all stored there is extremely unclear. While Bryan seeks to shed some light via his tests, his findings are far more positive than my own. My own experience with PhotoLab 5 metadata is extremely worrying. Moving images with the .dop and without the database most of it disappears.
I’d love to see someone like @Stenis who really deeply understands image metadata standards and has substantial experience managing said metadata at scale in the real world test metadata portability and cross-application compatibility rigorously.
What PhotoLab 5.x or PhotoLab 6 should do is clear:
- keep image processing data in a .dop
- share image metadata (IPTC, ratings) in a .xmp
Why?
Image processing data is more or less proprietary (crop could usefully be shared with PhotoMechanic but that’s another more complex topic, what would be most useful here is if PhotoLab would read the PhotoMechanic crop data if it doesn’t have its own crop data, i.e. one-way sync) hence no need to share.
On the other hand, metadata includes a number of open standards and is very usefully shared among photo applications in .xmp format.
DxO’s mad rush to a database only world is a real step backwards and erodes a substantial competitive advantage. The kind of photographers who will invest in an expensive tool¹ like DxO PhotoLab treasure image portability. It’s time for us as the people who fund PhotoLab and DxO to step up and demand that DxO maintain and improve image portability.
Mailer’s limitation is that it does not work on multidomain and it’s old enough to be finicky and obsolete.
Footnotes
1. If DxO seriously hopes to chase the Adobe Lightroom masses, the first step would be to cut prices in half. That won’t (and probably shouldn’t) happen. Even at half-price, the “I’ve heard of Adobe, it’s really pro, everyone uses Lightroom” crowd won’t come. Thirty percent new users with three times as many support tickets (complex tools in the hands of less expert users enough generate many times more support tickets than expert users, we are a software publisher as well, this is first hand field experience) will not even start to make up for a 50% decline in revenues. Plus with DxO showing a stiff finger to smart phone owners for the last five years, thinking of mass adoption of PhotoLab is risible. The lack of reliable support for my iPhone DNG sometimes makes even me regret my choice of RAW developer.