PM + Capture One Metadata Exchange

[mjcampagna]

Hello, there. I am new to Photo Mechanic, and I'm trying to integrate it into my workflow, largely built around Capture One Pro.

I have a large collection of "legacy" images, which were converted to DNG and assigned metadata in Lightroom.

These images have been living to Capture One Pro, alongside newer imagery.

Now trying to wrangle it all with Photo Mechanic, and having some difficulty getting the metadata to behave itself.

For DNG files originally dealt with in Lightroom, PM is seeing crop information and some metadata from Lightroom, and is apparently ignoring all metadata updates from Capture One Pro. PM is not display star ratings from either application.

For images that have only ever lived in Capture One Pro, PM seems not to be importing any metadata at all.

And so, my images are either displaying outdated metadata, or none at all.

Capture One Pro is configured to sync metadata to XMP sidecars. I was expecting PM to read these, but that seems not to be happening.

What I really want is for PM to read-in all metadata from Capture One Pro, including star ratings.

The only success I've had, if I apply ratings to images in PM, I can then import images into Capture One Pro with those ratings. Any changes then made in Capture One Pro, though, do not echo back to Photo Mechanic.

Can anyone advise how to ensure two-way metadata sync between Capture One and Photo Mechanic?

[michaelbothager]

Hi

Capture One only writes metadata to sidecar files (XMP) for all file types, including file types, which do allow embedding of IPTC/XMP metadata (TIFF, PSD, JPEG, DNG etc.) Photo mechanic, on the other hand, expects that these file formats have the IPTC/XMP metadata embedded.

So Photo Mechanic will not read sidecar files for your DNG files.

With regular (non-DNG) RAW files, this should not be an issue, since Photo Mechanic reads the sidecar file.

When using Capture One with other software, Capture One's design decision to never embed metadata inside original files is troublesome. The only time, that Capture One embeds the metadata is when exporting using Process Recipes

In my experience, the only way to fully sync metadata updates is only using Photo Mechanic to update IPTC etc. and then read the data into Capture One, using the "Load Metadata" in the "Image" menu of Capture One.

[mjcampagna]

Thanks for the info. That is unfortunate.

I'll try posting a feature request, as I suppose that is my only possible recourse.