Below is part of a response I got from DXO on an unrelated issue:
While your images through Photo Mechanic are working now, they may not in the future due to an update of Optics Pro or Photo Mechanic. Because of this, we only support the moving of images from your camera card to your hard drive using the operating system's copy and paste programs. Photo Mechanic has been known in the past to cause compatibility issues with images in Optics Pro which we do not support.
I'm rather surprised, as have been using PM for a long time with absolutely no issues, but am trying out DXO to process some Olympus ORF's with lens correction profiles.
Can you shed any light on what the issue might be?
Their software does not work properly with RAW images that are modified (or at least it didn't work well in the past with modified RAW files). Most RAW files are semi-proprietary in that they are not fully documented by the camera manufacturers, but most RAW file formats are based off of the TIFF standard which uses a table that is usually placed near the beginning of the file. This table details where various important parts of the image data are located. This table may be relocated to a different part of the file and then be subsequently modified which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do according to the TIFF specification. There is a link that describes the offset of this table and if followed rather than assumed to always be at the default offset will allow any proper TIFF-parsing application to work correctly. In the past, (I can't speak for their current state of their software) this caused their software to consider any RAW file with a relocated TIFF table to be damaged. From reading between the lines in their comments to you, they may have updated their parser to work with relocated TIFF tables but are warning you that their support may change in the future. I can say that we have no plans to change the way we update TIFF-based RAW files since our methods are very tried and true and as such we have no need to change the implementation.
PM gives you the choice to never modify RAW files, or to allow it to embed metadata into RAW files. If you're concerned about compatibility, just go with an XMP sidecar workflow (you will have one .XMP file for each RAW image that you edit in PM) but PM won't modify your RAW files and DXO should (as they claim) always work with unmodified RAW files.
As for their suggestion to use copy and paste? I can't think of a more inefficient workflow. Use PM's Ingest feature: that's what it is made to do, download, backup, rename, and add base metadata to your images all in one step. If you've told PM not to modify your RAW files, they will remain untouched (except for any file renaming which does not modify any file contents) and you will have your metadata represented in XMP sidecar files.
HTH,
-Kirk
