make tagging of photos a catalog-only function

[SAMouzon]

I do a monthly sync between my image catalog on an attached RAID drive and my portable RAID drive I use when I travel. I noticed that I'm having a much longer sync run yesterday and today than normal, but then realized that whenever an image is tagged or untagged that counts as a file modification, and I've been doing a lot of checking and unchecking recently for reasons that are tldr. Here's my question: have you considered making tagging a catalog-only function rather than a file function? In other words, make it tag the image record in the catalog but not change the actual image file?

[Kirk Baker]

I do a monthly sync between my image catalog on an attached RAID drive and my portable RAID drive I use when I travel. I noticed that I'm having a much longer sync run yesterday and today than normal, but then realized that whenever an image is tagged or untagged that counts as a file modification, and I've been doing a lot of checking and unchecking recently for reasons that are tldr. Here's my question: have you considered making tagging a catalog-only function rather than a file function? In other words, make it tag the image record in the catalog but not change the actual image file?

That is the way that some cataloging systems work.  We're not making that sort of change in the near term, but we do want to allow working with offline files for metadata edits which could be extended to let the images, when online, be out of sync with the catalog.  But it would have to be an option since it may be confusing to users when browsing folders directly vs. working with search/browse/filter results from the catalog.  Browsing a folder directly would always modify the files and catalog results could be set to not modify the files.

Definitely room for confusion there and it would likely add to our support load which we try to avoid.

-Kirk

[SAMouzon]

Understood, Kirk... thanks! But if this changes anything, I wasn't talking about metadata in general, but solely the tagging of images. I'd get really confused if it was all metadata.

[Kirk Baker]

Understood, Kirk... thanks! But if this changes anything, I wasn't talking about metadata in general, but solely the tagging of images. I'd get really confused if it was all metadata.

The tag, rating, color class, crop rectangle, etc. are all stored in the metadata.

-Kirk

[Mick O (Camera Bits)]

I've been doing a lot of checking and unchecking recently for reasons that are tldr.

In some ways, this is why the + / keys in the Preview window exist, i.e  to add/remove images from the "selected set" as a way to identify images in a more ephemeral way that doesn't involve the metadata.   No idea if this would be feasible for your tldr reasons, but thought I would mention it.

Edit to add: You can then save the selection for later use if you needed it to be less ephemeral at some juncture.

Mick