Ratings interoperability

[dd-b]

Right now, the 1-5 ratings I apply to images, and the color labels in tests I've run, aren't visible to Bibble Pro (4 or 5).  I've got workarounds involving sorting the images out into directories by rating, but they're a pain, and are easy for me to mess up.

They also don't seem to be visible to Thumbs Plus, my cataloging application of choice.

Fast Picture Viewer Pro, in contrast, implements these features in such a way that they interoperate with Bibble just fine.  I've been using PM for a few years now, and this is starting to get to be a Big Deal problem in my workflow.

[Kirk Baker]

Right now, the 1-5 ratings I apply to images, and the color labels in tests I've run, aren't visible to Bibble Pro (4 or 5).  I've got workarounds involving sorting the images out into directories by rating, but they're a pain, and are easy for me to mess up.

They also don't seem to be visible to Thumbs Plus, my cataloging application of choice.

Fast Picture Viewer Pro, in contrast, implements these features in such a way that they interoperate with Bibble just fine.  I've been using PM for a few years now, and this is starting to get to be a Big Deal problem in my workflow.

Photo Mechanic writes ratings and color labels into XMP data just like Adobe's apps do.  Are these other apps XMP compatible?

-Kirk

[dd-b]

I've been playing with settings on both ends, and have made some progress.  I can now see ratings from PM XMP files in Bibble. 

I cannot see arbitrary labels (colors); but it appears that I can see colors if I configure PM to use the same names that Bibble uses.   I'm not sure that's actually useful, though. 

Bibble claims to be XMP compatible; but they point out that labels aren't really standardized (which is true; the name and color settings I make in PM aren't part of the image metadata, they're part of PM config).

Let's step back to the big picture -- there seems to be a severe problem with interoperability surrounding the rating / labeling / tagging area.  Obviously the best solution is a good standard that everybody then supports, but before we reach that (and to gain the experience necessary to know what actually constitutes a good standard), we need workable solutions on an ad-hoc basis.

The only Adobe imaging ap I use is Photoshop, and it doesn't do anything that I can find with either ratings or labels.  Maybe Bridge sees them, but why would I use bridge when I have Photo Mechanic AND Thumbs Plus?  I don't see why Adobe bothers to keep developing Bridge, it seem useful only for small photo collections being used casually -- and those users don't use Photoshop.

[Kirk Baker]

I've been playing with settings on both ends, and have made some progress.  I can now see ratings from PM XMP files in Bibble. 

I cannot see arbitrary labels (colors); but it appears that I can see colors if I configure PM to use the same names that Bibble uses.   I'm not sure that's actually useful, though. 

Bibble claims to be XMP compatible; but they point out that labels aren't really standardized (which is true; the name and color settings I make in PM aren't part of the image metadata, they're part of PM config).

Photo Mechanic writes out labels in several different ways:

(1) In our 'end of file preferences' which most apps don't pickup on them but they're there for backwards compatibility with older versions of PM.
(2) In the xap:label field of XMP which writes out the name of the label, color information is not included.  This is the Adobe standard.
(3) Synchronized as an index in the IPTC Urgency field.  This is the iView Multimedia way.

Surely Bible can handle one of the last two methods?  No?

-Kirk