IPTC and XMP Settings for Maximum Compatibility

[amdaddio]

Hello,
   I’m having some issues with some of my IPTC and XMP settings being retained through other programs and the off-site server that we use, and I wanted to see if you might be able to help me to adjust my Photo Mechanic settings to maximize compatibility throughout the entire workflow.

   I use Photo Mechanic for the first steps in my workflow. I have adjusted the Color Classes to be compatible with Adobe Products (i.e. they are the same for all the applications). I do my initial renaming, editing, and application of keywords and metadata in Photo Mechanic. I then import the images into Adobe Lightroom, and all Color Classes and Star Ratings are retained in Lightroom and Photoshop.

I apply exposure adjustments and corrections in Lightroom, and depending on the image, may make further adjustments in Photoshop. The Colors and Star Ratings are retained throughout this entire process. I then upload the final images as level 12 JPEGs to an off-site server hosted by Merlinone. When I download the images from the server, all Color Class and Star Ratings are lost.

Is there something that I can do in Photo Mechanic to insure that these ratings will remain throughout the process, or is this an issue with how their server interprets the IPTC or XMP data? Is this an IPTC/XMP urgency field issue? Or perhaps the “read XMP before IPTC” or “read IPTC before xmp” field in the IPTC/XMP panel? I have been in contact with the Merlinone Tech Support, have applied all the settings that they recommend for Photo Mechanic, but the ratings are still lost and not retained upon download. Having the ratings remain with the images would be extremely helpful for other members of our department (designers, art directors, web directors, etc.) when they download the files and this information is simply being lost.

I believe that I recall that Photo Mechanic and Adobe products write the information to different fields, so perhaps that is the problem? But I thought that there was a way to maximize compatibility between all schemas. I can send you screen captures of my Photo Mechanic preference panels if that would be helpful. Any help or information that you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance for any attention or assistance you can provide for this inquiry.

Photo Mechanic Version 4.6.3
Macintosh Mac Pro / Quad-Core Intel Xeon 2.26 GHz
Mac OSX 10.5.8
8GB DDR3 RAM

[Kirk Baker]

   I’m having some issues with some of my IPTC and XMP settings being retained through other programs and the off-site server that we use, and I wanted to see if you might be able to help me to adjust my Photo Mechanic settings to maximize compatibility throughout the entire workflow.

   I use Photo Mechanic for the first steps in my workflow. I have adjusted the Color Classes to be compatible with Adobe Products (i.e. they are the same for all the applications). I do my initial renaming, editing, and application of keywords and metadata in Photo Mechanic. I then import the images into Adobe Lightroom, and all Color Classes and Star Ratings are retained in Lightroom and Photoshop.

I apply exposure adjustments and corrections in Lightroom, and depending on the image, may make further adjustments in Photoshop. The Colors and Star Ratings are retained throughout this entire process. I then upload the final images as level 12 JPEGs to an off-site server hosted by Merlinone. When I download the images from the server, all Color Class and Star Ratings are lost.

Is there something that I can do in Photo Mechanic to insure that these ratings will remain throughout the process, or is this an issue with how their server interprets the IPTC or XMP data? Is this an IPTC/XMP urgency field issue? Or perhaps the “read XMP before IPTC” or “read IPTC before xmp” field in the IPTC/XMP panel? I have been in contact with the Merlinone Tech Support, have applied all the settings that they recommend for Photo Mechanic, but the ratings are still lost and not retained upon download. Having the ratings remain with the images would be extremely helpful for other members of our department (designers, art directors, web directors, etc.) when they download the files and this information is simply being lost.

I believe that I recall that Photo Mechanic and Adobe products write the information to different fields, so perhaps that is the problem? But I thought that there was a way to maximize compatibility between all schemas. I can send you screen captures of my Photo Mechanic preference panels if that would be helpful. Any help or information that you can provide would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance for any attention or assistance you can provide for this inquiry.

What I'd rather have is one of your images before you upload it and one after you've downloaded it from the server.  I can then look inside the files to see if the metadata has been lost or not.  Please click on my name to the left of this message, then click on the 'personal message' link.  I will respond with upload instructions.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[riecks]

Amdaddio:

You might find the Photo Mechanic tutorial that I put up on the Photo Metadata website to be useful for setting preferences. I include screen shots for the critical preference panels to be compatible with an Adobe workflow, and Kirk has checked and approved them (as of version 4.6.2).

Setting Preferences starts here:
http://www.photometadata.org/META-Tutorials-Photo-Mechanic-Setting-Metadata-Preferences

The full tutorial starts here:
http://www.photometadata.org/META-Tutorials-Photo-Mechanic

If I understand your post, you are posting level 12 JPEGs on a MerlinOne server, but you don't know if the file has been altered before it's downloaded. Two ways I can think of to check for what might be happening.  First, I would download one of the images and inspect it with ExifTool. The simplest way is with Jeffrey Friedl's Online Metadata checker at http://regex.info/exif.cgi and see if both the IPTC and XMP containers are retained. If the XMP container is missing then MerlinOne is doing something to the files. Star Ratings and Color Labels (as well as a number of other IPTC Core fields) are only stored in XMP, they are not stored in the older IPTC-IIM (information interchange model) style of metadata. If MerlinOne is only retaining IPTC-IIM, then that is what's causing your issue.

Another method of checking files to see if anything has changed is with the use of an Check Sum utility. Here are two freeware utilities that will generate an MD5 (or other) hashtag for a file.

MD5Summer (windows freeware)
http://www.md5summer.org/
GUI - Windows
Open source application which generates and verifies md5 checksums.
Based on MD5sum, for Ubuntu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Md5sum
application for Microsoft Windows 9x, NT, ME, 2000 and XP which generates and verifies md5 checksums

checkSum+ (freeware for mac OS X 10.4 to 10.6)
http://homepage.mac.com/julifos/soft/checksum/index.html
checkSum+ will handle md5, sfv & cvs files

Use the appropriate version to create an MD5 hash/checksum for a single file.  Upload the image to MerlinOne.  Download it later and put it into a different folder, along with a copy of the MD5 checksum. Then double click on the .md5 file to compare the hash with the downloaded file (note that the filename has to be the same as the name of the original file so if MerlinOne has renamed the file you'll have to set it back to the original name). If the hash fails stating "bad" then that indicates that image has been modified in some manner between the time it left your machine and the time you downloaded it.  Do keep in mind that the hash will fail even if all that was done was a simple change to the caption, keywords, etc, as well as any change in pixel dimensions. However, even if the file modification date shows as being different (due to download time); so long as the pixel stream and header info has not changed the file will check out as OK.

I use this all the time with folders of images to verify file transfers across servers so that I know that the RAW files haven't been corrupted and without having to re-open each file to test that is it OK.

Hope that helps.

David