Keywords and searching RAWs

[JHofman]

I've recently purchased PM after several rounds of trials. I really like the keyword structuring and speed of browsing, however, I have a problem. I've searched the Support forum and haven't found the solution, so all apologies if this has been addressed before:

The whole point of keywording (for me) is to quickly find the images amongst the thousands that I take. After tagging some of the images, I did a test. When plugging in the test search term in the Search toolbar, the RAW (Nikon NEF) never come up, but any jpegs or dngs with the tag do come up.

When I browse to the same files in Bridge, I see they have the keywords and can be found using the Bridge search function. When I do the same search in OSX Spotlight I get the xmp files and not the associated NEF files. Is there any way to attach a searchable variable to a RAW file in PM? What is the solution here?

The whole point of switching over to PM for me was the speed vs. Bridge. Without the fast search function, this is now a severely handicapped program for my needs.

Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers
Justin
www.Justin-Hofman.com
Instagram: @justinhofman

[Kirk Baker]

Justin,

I've recently purchased PM after several rounds of trials. I really like the keyword structuring and speed of browsing, however, I have a problem. I've searched the Support forum and haven't found the solution, so all apologies if this has been addressed before:

The whole point of keywording (for me) is to quickly find the images amongst the thousands that I take. After tagging some of the images, I did a test. When plugging in the test search term in the Search toolbar, the RAW (Nikon NEF) never come up, but any jpegs or dngs with the tag do come up.

When I browse to the same files in Bridge, I see they have the keywords and can be found using the Bridge search function. When I do the same search in OSX Spotlight I get the xmp files and not the associated NEF files. Is there any way to attach a searchable variable to a RAW file in PM? What is the solution here?

The whole point of switching over to PM for me was the speed vs. Bridge. Without the fast search function, this is now a severely handicapped program for my needs.

Any help would be appreciated.

The Mac OS X version of Photo Mechanic uses Apple's Spotlight technology to search for metadata.  Unfortunately, Spotlight does not index XMP sidecar files properly, nor does it associate them with any suitable image files.

There is no solution to this issue at this time.

-Kirk

[Franz Dur]

The simple solution is to write the metadata to the NEF. The keywords are seen by my cataloger and searchable.

This is with Win 7 Pro 64 bits should work on Mac as well.

Francis

[Kirk Baker]

Francis,

The simple solution is to write the metadata to the NEF. The keywords are seen by my cataloger and searchable.

Some folks want their RAW files never to be modified.  So this is not a solution for everyone.

-Kirk

[Franz Dur]

Of course Kirk, many think that a raw HAS to remain untouched. They certainly have good reasons and made bad experiences loosing unique pictures. It never happened to me.

It is really a workflow choice.  Writing to the raw gives extra flexibility, like in the present example where keywords can be assigned while ingesting, searched for easily and transfered automatically to jpg/tiff derivatives, so all versions of a picture are in synchrony.

The alternative is to write to an xmp sidecar and search with programs that understand the link between mypix.nef and mypix.xmp...

Francis