Editing photos deletes existing ratings and keywords

[Gary Small]

I use Photo Supreme to assign star ratings, keywords and catalog photos. These ratings and keywords are visible in Nitro (at least with Jpegs from old pre-raw files). As soon as I edit one of these files, the ratings and keywords are lost. Clearly, this is not a great workflow. The Jpegs contain the metadata WITHOUT xmp sidecars, but Nitro reads them. When Nitro assigns metadata, an xmp sidecar is created, but is not visible to Photo Supreme. Is this because the xmp file is stored BEFORE the actual file (proprietary to Nitro?).

What I am trying to do is use the star ratings in Photo Supreme to make a select subset of files to edit in Nitro, then export as HEIC files to the Photos Library. I guess I’ll have to move those “select” files to a temporary folder, then open that folder in Nitro for editing…THEN move those files back to the original folder to keep my catalog intact. This seems like a bad process. Is there something I am missing?

thanks

[Nik Bhatt]

Nitro does not modify original images, so it uses sidecars in all cases. However, Adobe never provided a naming strategy for XMP except for proprietary RAWs, so I had to make one up. So, if you are tagging JPEGs, DNGs, TIFFs, etc. the Nitro sidecar is probably not detected by other apps. If you export to a HEIC, then Nitro will write the ratings into the file.

I plan in the future to let people just use “.xmp” for those sidecars, but that will cause problems if you shoot RAW+JPEG because both R and J will want to write to the same XMP file.

[Johan Kaving]

I’ve run into this as well.
I think what’s missing is that Nitro doesn’t copy the rating from the original file to its XMP file.

As long as there’s no XMP file Nitro reads the rating from the original file.
But when you do an edit in Nitro it will create an XMP file with the edit information.
That XMP will not contain any <xmp:Rating> element.
I assume that the Nitro-created XMP file will then take precedence over the rating in the original file.

A workflow that breaks because of this:

• Shoot images and rate them in camera
• Transfer to a folder on my computer and open that folder with Nitro
• Filter to only show one-star or better
• Select all an apply a preset
• All images disappear – I now need to change the filter to show edited images

I think a fix would be for Nitro to copy the rating from the original file when creating a new XMP.
But once the XMP file exists any rating in it should override the one in the original file.

[Gary Small]

I do follow the explanations, but the current process kills my workflow (as previously described). What DOES work (which wasn’t my hoped for solution) is to import the files into Apple Photos with all metadata intact, then use Nitro to edit in the Photos Library feature. This only works with my non-raw files (roughly from the dawn of time to about 2008, when I started shooting in raw. Since Apple after all this time still does not read Fuji compressed, those files need another process. Those files will be developed initially with DxO Photolab, exported to TIFF, then converted to HEIC or JXL for final tweaking.

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