Tags set using Windows Explorer Are Not Visible In IPTC Keywords Panel

[ravi]

Hi,

I’m evaluating a trial version of PhotoMechanic v5 build 16960 on a Windows 7 Pro SP1 (64 bit) system, and am having difficulty getting Keywords to display in the PhotoMechanic IPTC Info panel.

Here’s what I’m doing, and the results of each method:

A – Using the native Windows Explorer file management tool (to be clear, not the Internet Explorer web browser), I browsed through the images in my folders. There’s a section in Explorer that shows “Tags”. All of the tags that I previously associated with each image file when it was imported originally are displayed here correctly.

B – Using the GeoSetter freeware utility, I opened an image file via the “Edit Meta Data of Image File” command.  All of the Tags that I saw in Windows Explorer show up perfectly in the Keywords section of the Categories/Keywords tab of the Edit Data panel.

C – Using PhotoMechanic, I opened a Contact Sheet for the folder containing the same images as viewed in methods A and B above, and then clicked the “i” button overlaid on a given image to open the IPTC Info window. The entire Keywords section of the IPTC Info window is blank. None of the tags I saw via methods A and B appear.

I’ve triple-checked to ensure I’m viewing the same image files with each method.

Am I missing something in terms of the relationship between the Keywords section of the IPTC Info window, EXIF Keywords and the Tags that Windows Explorer displays for an image file? Or, is there a configuration setting that I need to modify in PhotoMechanic perhaps?

All of my images are JPEG format.

Thanks for your help!

[Kirk Baker]

Hi,

I’m evaluating a trial version of PhotoMechanic v5 build 16960 on a Windows 7 Pro SP1 (64 bit) system, and am having difficulty getting Keywords to display in the PhotoMechanic IPTC Info panel.

Here’s what I’m doing, and the results of each method:

A – Using the native Windows Explorer file management tool (to be clear, not the Internet Explorer web browser), I browsed through the images in my folders. There’s a section in Explorer that shows “Tags”. All of the tags that I previously associated with each image file when it was imported originally are displayed here correctly.

B – Using the GeoSetter freeware utility, I opened an image file via the “Edit Meta Data of Image File” command.  All of the Tags that I saw in Windows Explorer show up perfectly in the Keywords section of the Categories/Keywords tab of the Edit Data panel.

C – Using PhotoMechanic, I opened a Contact Sheet for the folder containing the same images as viewed in methods A and B above, and then clicked the “i” button overlaid on a given image to open the IPTC Info window. The entire Keywords section of the IPTC Info window is blank. None of the tags I saw via methods A and B appear.

I’ve triple-checked to ensure I’m viewing the same image files with each method.

Am I missing something in terms of the relationship between the Keywords section of the IPTC Info window, EXIF Keywords and the Tags that Windows Explorer displays for an image file? Or, is there a configuration setting that I need to modify in PhotoMechanic perhaps?

All of my images are JPEG format.

Thanks for your help!

Photo Mechanic does not display nor edit these "Exif Tags".  They're not IPTC or XMP keywords.  Feel free to post a sample JPEG and I'll investigate further to see exactly what kind of metadata Microsoft is inserting into your JPEGs, but it is unlikely that we'll ever support them.  Textual metadata in EXIF is not where the industry is going.  It's all XMP for a variety of reasons.

Use the 'Attachments and other options' link when you're composing your reply to this message and there you'll be able to upload your JPEG sample file.

Thanks,

-Kirk

[ravi]

Thanks for the clarifying the difference between EXIF tags and XMP keywords. That put me at ease because my primary concern was that somehow the tag data was being corrupted. That's clearly not the case since the data sets are separate.

To figure out what was going on, I tested a few approaches. Some key findings:

1 - Turns out that if I use Windows Explorer to delete all previous tags associated with an old image, save the changes, and then add the tags back, then those new tags show up as expected in the Keywords section of the IPTC Info window in Photo Mechanic.

2 - I also noticed that new images that I "keyworded" for the first time using Photo Mechanic and then viewed from within Windows Explorer had those Keywords show up as expected in the Tags section of Windows Explorer. The opposite also worked in which I tagged a new image for the first time using Windows Explorer, and the tag showed up as expected in the Keywords section of Photo Mechanic.

3 - The apparent root cause though, is that I determined that all of the images which exhibited this problem were tagged years ago using an older version of Windows.

I'm guessing that one of the Windows OS upgrades modified where these Tags were stored. Deleting tags created under the old OS, and recreating them in the new version of Windows Explorer puts them where contemporary tools expect to find them - IPTC/XMP. So, I'm just going to batch delete the tags from these old images using Windows Explorer (very easy to do), and then Keyword them using Photo Mechanic. This way, all of my images have tags in a common container (XMP) that can be viewed consistently.

Problem solved 

[Kirk Baker]

I'm guessing that one of the Windows OS upgrades modified where these Tags were stored. Deleting tags created under the old OS, and recreating them in the new version of Windows Explorer puts them where contemporary tools expect to find them - IPTC/XMP. So, I'm just going to batch delete the tags from these old images using Windows Explorer (very easy to do), and then Keyword them using Photo Mechanic. This way, all of my images have tags in a common container (XMP) that can be viewed consistently.

That's great, Ravi.  Thanks for posting the solution so that others may benefit.

-Kirk