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.

[Rosemary Taylor]

Yes this is exactly what I have found too. And I agree with your suggested solution as well so it becomes a request for Nik to make a change.

I have many photos which were rated and keyworded elsewhere and it would help enormously if Nitro copied the original XMP data when creating its own .xmp sidecar file.

[Nik Bhatt]

I think there is some confusion here (at least I’m confused). We have to separate out XMP (file system) from Photo library (database).

When using the file system, Nitro does read ratings from original images. However, I see that there is a bug where if you then do something to generate a Nitro XMP file, the rating is discarded. So, I will fix that.

When using the Photo library, Nitro does not read ratings from original files. That is mostly because the Photo Library does not provide them to me. The only way for me to read them would be to read the original file. However, with the Photo Library, that could be in iCloud. So, I would have to download every image, just to see if there is a rating in the original file. I don’t want to do that. If people wanted, I could add a feature where you can select images and it will download them and read the metadata. I just don’t want to download every image “just in case” there is a rating, since it’s uncommon.

[Rosemary Taylor]

Thank you Nik. Funnily enough I hadn’t thought about the .xmp thing as a bug and instead regarded it just as a quirk of Nitro. My solution has been to open a folder of photos so that previous ratings are displayed, then for each photo simply set the same rating again for each file before doing anything else. A fix would be most welcome.

[Gary Small]

This is a belated follow up, but a new twist (I think). So now working with Photo Mechanic and Nitro (File System)…I can add keywords to RAW files in Nitro and see them in Photo Mechanic, but when I add keywords to Apple DNG (iPhone ProRaw) files, they are NOT visible in Photo Mechanic (or other apps including Apple Preview Info). I can add keywords in Photo Mechanic to DNGs (as well as raw files) and Nitro DOES see them.

So I’m not sure how the previous explanation really applies. When Nitro adds keywords to my Fuji “Raf” files, there is an “xmp” file AFTER the raw file, and other apps see it. When Nitro adds keywords to the DNG files, the “xmp” file is BEFORE the file and other software(s) do NOT see it.

I don’t really see the consistency here. I would REALLY like to be able to use Nitro to add initial metadata to my iPhone 17pro (ProRaw) files (DNGs) like I can the raws from my other “real” cameras, but not possible currently as I understand it.

Any chance of a “fix” for this? Thanks….Gary

[Nik Bhatt]

Please see the other thread you posted on about this for an explanation of why Nitro does not use “original.xmp” for DNG / TIFF / JPEG.

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