That's news to me.
Reading this seemed a bit familiar, so I took a look and my Nikon D200 and does have the ability to hide images. It's not quite as simple to marking images as protected as it requires use of the menus, but apparently it will hide images. A quick check and it appears that this has been available since the D1 and all but the D50, D40, D40x appear to have this option. According to Nikon's manuals, hidden images have the "hidden" and "read only" file attributes set.
I thought they only could mark them as locked (read only) which we mark automatically as tagged.
If I understand this correctly, files marked as "protected" in camera (which should apparently have the "read only" file attribute set) are automatically tagged when ingested by Photo Mechanic? Is the read-only attribute removed from the file?
I would rather just mark these hidden files as tagged to and then make them visible.
For now I would agree that it would be best to ingest them and at a minimum mark them as visible (i.e. remove the hidden attribute and possibly the read-only attribute). Tagging them might not be a bad idea either, but perhaps in the future you might want to add some preference options for such actions. Possibly the following options...
Automatically tag protected images during ingest?
Automatically tag hidden images during ingest?
Better yet would be the ability to either tag or assign a specific color class to protected as well as do the same for hidden images. I'm not indicating that I have a specific need for this, but I could see it as something others could find useful.
-Ian