I switched to DXO Photolab after decades of using Lightroom and have been very impressed so far. However, there is one issue which has bothered me so I thought I’d provide some feedback.
I use BOTH Mac and PC. When travelling I take my MacBook because it is light and has very good battery life. I purchased a NAS so I can store my images there and edit them on either system.. However I found the .dop files were incompatible between Mac & PC, so I need to delete all my edits from my Mac (physically delete the .dop files), in order for them to open on the PC. If I keep the Mac .dop files I get an error message and cant edit the photos.
While it’s not the end of the world, as I dont normally edit too much while travelling, it would be preferable if the .dop files were compatible between systems.
I’ve used Mac and Win for years with few issues. The one known issue is that profiles (ICC/DCP/LUT) are written to dop as absolute paths, that are inherently not portable, and in that case you either get an error message when opening an image on the “other” platform or the profile is silently ignored. (Can’t remember if the error is on Mac or Win offhand.) As long as I’ve avoided profiles, things have mostly just worked, and when I have run into incompatibilities DxO has fixed the problems after I’ve reported them.
That said, DxO has recently made a mess of this, as I wrote here.
Could it be that you’re using DCP or LUT in your editing?
I should also add that my experience is with PL1 through PL8. I’ve run the PL9 trial, but not tested Mac/Win compatibility extensively, partly because of the number of other issues with PL9 when it was first released. I’m not at all happy with the lack of clarity regarding DxO’s intentions regarding Mac/Win compatibility, and probably will not upgrade because of it.
A PL that becomes two incompatible applications on Mac and Win is useless to me, and if this is the direction that DxO is heading then I’ll move to something else. PL is a very nice editor that produces excellent output, and I’ve used it since PL1 for that reason, but I’m also not happy with DxO’s not particularly strict approach to backwards compatibility: they will change and break things from release to release and leave it up to users to adapt instead of being meticulous in ensuring that the rendering of existing edits is unchanged. The removal of PRIME in PL9 is an example or this.
As platform dependency still exists in themselves it would be very beneficial if DxO would be able to find a solution for that.
I use PhotoSupreme as DAM and they did their own path management to enable multi platform independent if the assets are stored on or accessed from a MacOS or windows. Their Postgres db and application do support a delivery of proper paths anyway.
Generally, there shouldn’t be much difference between sidecar/.dop files for Mac vs PC … other than embedded pathnames for LUTs, etc - as mentioned above by @asvensson
Thanks for this! I do use DCP Nikon camera profiles (Adobe) as they seem to give me the closest colours compared with out of camera jpgs (e.g. Camera Landscape), so that might be what is causing the issue!
It has been well documented in multiple threads that .dop files are not compatible with multiple OS. The last incompatibility I found: local adjustment “names” written with MacOS are simply dropped and replaced with generic titles when you open the file in Windows. If you rename the local adjustments for Windows, then MacOS happily displays the customized names.
Using different platforms to handle the same images is one of the worst ideas in combination with PhotoLab. It even struggles when being used on two computers with the same (kind and possibly version of) OS.
Years ago, DxO made the sidecars platform independent, but that’s now limited to basic operations…unless DxO has trashed the concept of interoperability altogether. If not, I’d expect the following to transport between the same versions of PhotoLab on either platform:
Metadata in xmp
Metadata in dop
Edits excluding those using dcp, lut, local adjustments
Nothing else
With its current state of affairs, I don’t consider PhotoLab to be pro-grade, although a limited set of its image editing features have the potential. Many current top solutions have moved to subscription though.
If the (relatively) recent changes to the documentation are any indication (and what else is there?), then trash interoperability is exactly what they’re doing, so I wouldn’t rely on the situation getting anything but worse.
Absolutely, but needing them because I can’t rely on PL to not continually break things is too much for me. PL releases are becoming make-work projects.
Capture One has always been more reliable in my experience, but they’ve released little of interest to me since the v22 I already have, so having to possibly buy a new license just to keep up with OS changes in the future isn’t very appealing.
So I decided to take another look at darktable, which I haven’t really looked at since I bought a PL1 license long ago. A very pleasant surprise: the past 2 weeks of trying out v5.4.0 makes me think that I’m not going to miss PL at all, and probably won’t return for PL10.
We all have different experiences and choose different paths along our journey.
I went from Nikons NX/NX2 and Aperture to C1 and loved its editing but it wreaked havoc and corrupted db’s when parsing larger db or importing ones from Aperture.
And their support was like one’s worst nightmare. So I left C1 and went on to DxO which I find so pleasing in so many ways. And when they bought out the NIK suite and got the old Nikon Upoint into PL, it was a bit like heaven.
Paired with VP and FP it’s extremely well suited for my needs. I wish they would sit down and rethink their marketing and bundling strategies through
I tried DT but never fell in love with it. Not with the UX and not with the working process.
I might look at DT again but I don’t have any direct need to switch platforms again.
I can fully understand someone when leaving out of despair and frustration - when you reach that level and the scale tips over - there’s no belief for the software left.
That too, but for me the random breakage has become too much. Removing PRIME in PL9 was the last straw for me. I wouldn’t be surprised if the remove the Legacy colour space in the future, and then they would literally break all of my existing edits.
I quite like it so far, and have already seen a number of things I think it does better than PL. That I can run it seamlessly across Win/Mac/Linux is great (no random UI differences either), the local copies functionality is very nice when editing on a laptop not wired to my NAS, and the possibility of running with an in-memory database (new in 5.4.0) make it little different from just browsing the filesystem, which is what I prefer. And, very importantly for me, they seem to take backwards compatibility seriously so I’m hoping that I don’t see application updates break previous edits as I’ve seen too often with PL. Time will tell.
