Making sidecar files more ‘readable’?

[RhodEvans]

Hi – I’m non technical so forgive me if I stray into unfamiliar waters! I use Photo Supreme as my DAM and until RP has its own DAM, Photo Supreme does an excellent job. I have set RP as my external editor for RAW files but edits were not being saved back to PS. I put a question to the PS user forum and received this response (below) from someone who obviously knows much more than I do about the subject! I’m not sure whether the author means I should make a feature request in PSu or in RAW Power. Surely it would be in your interest to make the sidecar file more ‘readable’ by other apps? There is probably nothing easy about this so forgive me if I’m asking for something ridiculously complex – like I said, I’m non technical.

Many thanks
Rhod

“The Raw Power application saves all changes and adjustments in a sidecar file.
The raw photo itself and its preview is not altered in any way.
Sidecar files are saved both in a sandbox container at
/Library/Containers/com.gentlemencoders.RAWPower/Data
but also in same directory as the original photo.

PhotoSupreme can to some extent read and parse sidecar files from certain manufactures like DxO, CaptureOne and Lightroom.
You might want to post a feature request asking if its possible to parse some or data from the sidecar and apply that to the preview.
Sometime those sidecars are pretty much impossible to parse properly as they are encrypted or encoded in very specific ways.

What you can do is to export a lower res jpeg from Raw Power with a certain name addition and then let PSU use that special jpeg as preview.

When I look at the Raw Powers sidecars they are not that inviting:

<key>currentAdjustmentData</key>
<data>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[Nik Bhatt]

Sidecars are great things but are very tricky to handle. You are correct that the RAW Power sidecars are not designed to be read by other apps. They could certainly be revised to make them readable but that wouldn’t actually solve the problem. I believe you want to edit an image in RAW Power and then somehow get the image to appear properly in Photo Supreme. There are two ways for that to happen:

1) Photo Supreme can read RAW Power adjustments AND faithfully reproduce them.
2) Photo Supreme extracts a full-size JPEG from RAW Power and displays that.

#1 is not practical – Photo Supreme would need a copy of the RAW Power editing engine, which of course it doesn’t have.
#2 is possible but it would need to know how to get the full-size JPEG. In the case of RAW Power, it’s stored next to the sidecar.

[RhodEvans]

Thanks Nik – many thanks for your response! I guess it’s just not practical.

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