IPTC Information not showing up in Extensis Portfolio

[adheidt]

We are using Photo Mechanic 5, build 19631 (bf87516) on iMac Pros running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.5, for ingesting images, editing shoots, and adding IPTC information in our workflow. We are using Extensis Portfolio 2017, 3.0.3, as our DAM program for searching our catalog of 200,000+ files. We shoot the majority of our images with Nikon cameras in NEF format. We have been incrementally experiencing a problem where none of the IPTC information that we add in Photo Mechanic is visible within Portfolio; this includes Description and Keywords, the two largest fields used for searching in our office. We’ve been working with Extensis to see if this is something on their end, and I’ve finally received a message stating what they think is happening:

If you open the files in Photoshop, then go File > File Info… > Raw Data:
This will show the Raw Data that Portfolio reads, and what you will see in many cases something like this:
 
  <photoshop:LegacyIPTCDigest>DC0B91D81380C890187622F524720DDF</photoshop:LegacyIPTCDigest>
         <photoshop:Category>Music</photoshop:Category>
         <photoshop:SupplementalCategories>
            <rdf:Bag>
               <rdf:li>Recording Industry</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Guests</rdf:li>
               <rdf:li>Students</rdf:li>
            </rdf:Bag>
         </photoshop:SupplementalCategories>
         <photoshop:Instructions>#</photoshop:Instructions>
         <photoshop:DateCreated>2012-01-06T20:01:12-06:00</photoshop:DateCreated>
         <photoshop:AuthorsPosition>Digital Specialist</photoshop:AuthorsPosition>
         <photoshop:City>Murfreesboro</photoshop:City>
         <photoshop:State>Tennessee</photoshop:State>
         <photoshop:Country>United States</photoshop:Country>
         <photoshop:Credit>Middle Tennessee State University</photoshop:Credit>
         <photoshop:Source>Creative and Visual Services, Photography</photoshop:Source>
         <photoshop:CaptionWriter>AH</photoshop:CaptionWriter>
         <photoshop:ColorMode>3</photoshop:ColorMode>
         <photoshop:ICCProfile>Adobe RGB (1998)</photoshop:ICCProfile>
 
So in a nutshell Photo Mechanic is writing your IPTC info to Photoshop fields not true IPTC fields.
They show in Photoshop in the IPTC info, but Portfolio doesn’t read from the photoshop raw data field.
 
If you can get Photo Mechanic to add the info as raw data to IPTC, Portfolio will be able to read it.

Two side notes to this – this only seems to affect NEF files, not TIF, JPEG, or DNG files. We were also experiencing heavy resource loads on our server, so our IT Department restarted the server, and once the thumbnail database had been rebuilt, all of the missing information that was not being displayed before has reappeared.

So my question is, does this seem like an accurate response from Extensis? Is there something that we are doing incorrectly in entering our IPTC information? I’ve attached a screenshot of the IPTC/XMP Preferences in Photo Mechanic.

[Patrick Wilson]

After doing some testing with the latest build of Portfolio and Photo Mechanic, I was unable to reproduce any lost keywords or captions.  Both using a standardized Photo Metadata Reference Image provided by IPTC for testing and with several hundred RAW images and JPGs.

I'm not familiar with the <photoshop:LegacyIPTCDigest>` field, but it isn't standard and we don’t put info there or read from this <photoshop> namespace field.

While I wasn't able to reproduce your issue, several things come to mind when reading through your post,  Portfolio is famously resource intensive - for the number of assets you've described you'll want a dedicated server instance with 4 processor cores and 16 GB of RAM and a dedicated, fast disk.  My suspicion is that Portfolio glitched from not having enough resources under such a heavy load.

[adheidt]

Thanks for looking into this, Patrick. That was our assumption, too, but we wanted to make sure that we covered all our concerns.