Good! Surprisingly enough I think you have done a lot right already with PhotoLibrary but still have a few flaws - as expected really with 1.0. The system works fine for me now though with Photo Mechanic Plus as a the absolute master of the metadata and that I NEVER EVER update anything at all in Photolab. If I index the topfolder of my metadata silo Photolab also indexes the lot and creates a sorted keyword list with the number of hits to the right. Do every one know they have too?
One thing I have noticed is that I sometimes get an empty keyword list when opening Photolab. The solution for that has been to select the topfolder of my folder hiararchy right click it and click “Refresh”. Maybee you have to look into this and perform an auto refresh. I think it might not be obvious to all to do that by themselves. I was positively surprised that you display in the resent searches list the number of hits and where it found them (by keywords, the file name or by the IPTC-tagging)
So my conditions for the integration with PM Plus 6 is for the moment as follows:
- PM Plus has to strictly own the metadata ( File - Metadata - Write ought to be disabled in Photolab with an external DAM as a master in order to prevent bidirectional updates and unsync)
- Only use non-hiararchical keywords
- No updates what so ever by EXIF or IPTC-elements in Photolab PhotoLibrary
- Import of metadata to Photolab by File - Metadata - Read after updating metadata in a folder in PM Plus
- Indexing topfolder of your image folder silo from within Photolab to populate keyword table
- Some times a “refresh” of the topfolder is necessary in Photolab to see the keyword
- XMP seems to be read automatically by Photolab when opening a RAW and exporting for example a JPEG. So this works already fine and do so even in Photolab 4. Don´t mess with that.
- You have to make a reindex of the same image folder in PM Plus efter exporting new JPEG-files to it from Photolab to bee in synk
Conditions for using Photolab as a master of metadata:
- Don´t ever use File - Metadata - Read! (ought to be disabled with Photolab as a master)
- Use non-hiararchical keywords
- To be sure to update the XMP-files or embedded metadata in JPEG - TIFF or DNG, select all images you have updated in the work session and export with File - Metadata - Write. (until we are deadly sure DxO kan guarantee they always update the XMP automatically)
- Unlike Lightroom the default always has to be writing to XMP automatically when updating metadata in PhotoLibrary