AI culling software embedded something in my RAW files? While AI was culling, I was still culling the same session manually in Photo Mechanic. I didn't like the AI results, uninstalled it. Came back to Photo Mechanic and all my files were randomly tagged by different colors! I only use ONE - red.
And so all my manual culling work of the day seems to be lost. All the files I tagged red (as my "yes" for the selection) are now green, blue or yellow. Now actually all of the raws have a color tagged assign, even those that I skipped.
The software was ImagenAI and Aftershoot. While running the AI culling I kept on working through the same session manually in Photo Mechanic with intent to compare the results and decide of the AI is of any help at all.
First I ran ImagenAI, it uploaded low-res previews to the cloud and made a selection I didn't like. Then I tried Aftershoot. It selected over 50% of the raws, and I normally select only 10-15%. I thought I had enough of it and uninstalled both ImagenAI and Aftershoot by going to their location and running "uninstall". After this I went back to Photo Mechanic to continue the culling manually. Only to see all my files color tagged with yellow, blue and green, both selected and skipped are mixed all together again. What a joke.
But how is it even possible? Could one of the AIs (I suspect Aftershoot is the culprit) change something in my original raws? mark them somehow? It was using star ratings that had according colors, so *, **, ***, **** and ***** ratings could be written into the program like an equivalent of a color mark? If so, does Photo Mechanic see this too? And it overrides my previous selection?
Is there any data security concern with AI marking our files with extra data?
