Hi Kirk,
In lieu of a manual, is there a comprehensive list available that show changes, new features, incompatibilities etc. between the two versions ?
Comprehensive list? As in every change made since PM 4.6.9? We worked on PM 5 for more than a year. It would be a really long list.
No. There is no comprehensive list.
Well, is there a "short" list ... especially in regard to the new fields and functions concerning the IPTC stationary pad and how things work there?
I run into problems using V5 as, especially with the IPTC Stationary Pad, which has many new fields, functionality, customizability and behaviour ... and seems not to be completely compatible with saved V4 snapshots or field values (or I just don't understand how it works).
What sort of compatibility problems? Please be specific. I know of no issues loading snapshots from PM 4.x in PM 5.
I ran into issues that items saved in v4.6.9 (for examples in the location, copyright, keyword fields to name a few) in v5 now are accessed via a multi level drop down menu, but I can't figure out based on what it was created. But it definitely took information previously saved in v.4.6.9.
Also there seem to be many new fields and I'm not sure what field in v5 compares to exactly what field in earlier versions.
I have furthermore problems with the customability ...
I think regarding the IPTC Stationary Pad a "guide" would be very helpfull ... (at least for me)
Running V5 on a Win7 Home Premium x64 it also looked up on me now several times applying IPTC stationery or GPS data to files. It becomes total unresponsive and one has to force a shut down.
I'd like to know how to reproduce these issues.
Well, ist pretty easy: open a contact sheet, select some pictures (10,20, doesn't matter) and open the IPTC stationary, fill it out and click apply ... PM then just hangs forever and is totaly unresponsive. One has to force it to shut down and restart. But it seems the information got applied to the selected files prior to PM looking up.
The same in the GPS data dialoge: select a few files, define a GPS location and click "Add Location" ... and PM just hangs. Again, I have to force it down and restart. And as before, the GPS data's are added to the selected files prior to PM becomming unresponsive.
We have added new features like rotating crops that are not fully backwards compatible with previous versions. They just can't be.
Hmm, don't really like that. I understand that if I add rotation to the crop that this is not compatible to V4, but straight crops?
Also, I miss the ability to just enter crop ratio fast without having to click open a drop down menu first...
We also no longer write our old End of File Image Preferences. They caused too much grief with various applications like Capture NX2 and some print services.
Don't know what that means for me to be honest. I'm at a complete loss what the "End of File Image Preferences" are, what they do or don't do, and what it means to me if they are not written any longer. No idea.
As for image rotation, if the image has the EXIF orientation tag in it, rotation should be compatible between the two versions. If the image didn't come from a camera then PM 4.6 likely won't see rotation changes from PM 5.
I don't know if the Nikon P7100 does not write the orientation into the file. In any case, orientation changes in v5 are definitely not visible in v4.6 (didn't try it the other way around).
For the Nikon D300 or D700 files I have to check whether the camera writes the orientation into the EXIF data , but I'm pretty sure those cameras do.
