Cross platform tagging Windows / OS X

[Sallinen]

Hi,

I was trying to tag my photos on a Windows laptop and then continue the process with my Mac later on but it seems that when I tag (NEF RAW files) on Windows my OS X Photo Mechanic is able to see the tags.
The other way round it works perfectly, all the files that I tag on my Mac with Photo Mechanic show as tagged on Windows Photo Mechanic.

Windows is accessing the files through a SMB share and Mac is accessing the files through NFS share (both from the same NAS).
Is tagging based on locking the file or writing tag information to PM database file in the directory?

[Kirk Baker]

Hi,

I was trying to tag my photos on a Windows laptop and then continue the process with my Mac later on but it seems that when I tag (NEF RAW files) on Windows my OS X Photo Mechanic is able to see the tags.
The other way round it works perfectly, all the files that I tag on my Mac with Photo Mechanic show as tagged on Windows Photo Mechanic.

Windows is accessing the files through a SMB share and Mac is accessing the files through NFS share (both from the same NAS).
Is tagging based on locking the file or writing tag information to PM database file in the directory?

I'm a little confused by your initial statements as it sounds to me that your tagging is working on both platforms.

There is no file locking.  There is no database.  The metadata is written to one of two places for a given image.  The first place would be in the image itself, or in the case of RAW files (and your specific settings in PM) to XMP sidecar files.

Make sure the settings in the IPTC/XMP section of the Preferences dialog match on both platforms.

-Kirk

[Sallinen]

Ah right - thanks!
I'll check XMP sidecar settings on both platforms and report back.
Yes this confused myself too as both platforms should handle the tagging the same way

[Sallinen]

The XMP/IPTC settings are the same of both platform (default settings), only character encoding is different on the platforms (Mac Roman vs Microsoft Latin1+Euro).
I observed modify dates on XMP files and noticed that when tagging Windows doesn't update the XMP modification/creation date, OS X does.

I checked the XMP and Windows PM doesn't write PM metadata (photomechanic:Tagged="True") to the file for some reason, even though the PM settings are at default and the same between both platforms.

[Sallinen]

Well this was sorted out - I was accessing through wrong SMB share!
The share I used was read-only so Windows Photo Mechanic was not able to write the XMP :-)

Does it resort to writing to local PM folder if Contact sheet directory is Read-Only?

[FVlcek]

So, a rights issue, then... Had my "share" of these when configuring network shares

As far as I know, when PM accesses a read-only folder (with no write access rights), it behaves similar to when you set the option to "Allow modification of files on Camera Disks (Not Recommended!)" disabled (default). So it presumably stores any edits (tags, rating,...) in local memory or cache only, forgetting them upon restart. Which is IMO nice behaviour, as it still allows you to make a temporary edit to say select a few files to copy elsewhere, without touching the archive. Myself I am slowly migrating to having the NAS mounted over a read-only share normally, while copying photos to it via rsync script with write credentials. That way I can hopefuly mitigate a finder crash or user error from wiping important files from the backup.

BTW, out of curiosity, why are you accessing it over NFS in OS X? Is it in any way better than SMB or AFP on the Mac?

[Kirk Baker]

Well this was sorted out - I was accessing through wrong SMB share!
The share I used was read-only so Windows Photo Mechanic was not able to write the XMP :-)

Does it resort to writing to local PM folder if Contact sheet directory is Read-Only?

No.  What local folder would it write to?  The metadata needs to go with the files (or in them).

-Kirk