Daniel,
Like a lot of people, I'm trying to figure out how to do more work with less staff. This means automating as much of my work flow as possible.
What I need to know is if there's a way for Applescript or Automator to recognize whether a photo has been tagged using Photo Mechanic. I know that there's a correlation between locking a photo in-camera and it being automatically tagged in PM but that doesn't seem to hold true between tagging in PM and having the file being locked in the Mac Finder.
Is there a way OS X can be aware of which files have been tagged in PM?
The tag data is generally stored in XMP metadata. If your files are JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs, or DNGs then the metadata is embedded in the image file itself. If your images are RAW then depending on your settings, you either have embedded XMP or a sidecar XMP file.
If you have some sort of plugin for Automator that will parse image files or read XMP sidecar files, then you can get the tag state. Or if you can execute another tool (a command-line app) like ExifTool then it could parse the files and return the tag state.
HTH,
-Kirk
