It is now 19 years I am using digital photography and a lot of software to manage them.
At the end I learned that I will still change of photo manager in the future for any reason.
And What I learned also is that every time I am changing, I am loosing all my info (location, rating of the picture, tags…). To solve this issue I avoid to have this info in the software database and put them as much as possible in the EXIF info on the JPEG. I can do that using XNview but as photolab could do it, would be better.
Would be nice to add the rating info in the file generated during the export process.
Like most raw processors, Photolab does not modify a file when you edit it. It supports non- destructive editing by using data from the database or sidecar file which is applied as an overlay, on the fly, when viewing an image in Photolab. There is no file save function. And since most of us probably tend to edit raw files until we’re ready to export to a shared format like jpeg, saving EXIF information would be irrelevant anyway before export.
To make edits available in an image file, including updates to EXIF data, would therefore require using the export function. Saving edits in jpegs without exporting first would call for a redesign of the non-destructive editing paradigm.