Reading star ratings in Nitro

[Andreas Yankopolus]

I’m using Nitro to edit images organized in nested subdirectories. I’ve been using Photo Supreme to add metadata to these images—it writes the metadata to the image file using standard XMP tags. I wouldn’t expect Photo Supreme to pick up star ratings made by Nitro due to Nitro’s sidecar naming strategy, but it doesn’t appear that Nitro picks up stars added by Photo Supreme (it does see other metadata added by Photo Supreme and exiftool scripts).

I can do some scripting to sync ratings but want to make sure that this is the expected behavior.

[Nik Bhatt]

It’s hard to say without more information. The app will read XMP data stored within an image file if it’s a DNG. XMP data written to RAW files probably won’t be read unless Apple’s metadata parsing code reads them.

If you open the RAW in Apple’s Preview app on the Mac, do you see the ratings?

[Andreas Yankopolus]

I see the start ratings for DNG files in Preview. The Preview Inspector pane doesn’t show much for HEICs.

Looking in the finder:

% exiftool -Xmp:Rating 2025-04-28-0001.heic
Rating : 1

% exiftool -Xmp:Rating 2025-04-30-0048.dng
Rating : 1

In both cases I’m not getting the files to show up with a star in Nitro.

[Andreas Yankopolus]

Now what’s pretty cool is can do:

% exiftool 2025-04-28-0001_heic.xmp -Xmp:Rating=1

Nitro immediately shows a star for the image. I can change it to two stars in Nitro and do:

% exiftool 2025-04-28-0001_heic.xmp -xmp:Rating
Rating : 1

Unfortunately, DAM software expects to see “2025-04-28-0001.xmp” for “2025-04-28-0001.heic”, so I need to run a script that uses exiftool to sync ratings between the XMP info in the image file “2025-04-28-0001.heic” and the Nitro-unique sidecar “2025-04-28-0001_heic.xmp”.

I remember the halcyon days of Aperture seamlessly handling everything…

[Nik Bhatt]

Using “.xmp” for all images will fail when there is an R+J pair. That’s because both R and J can have XMP files, so the there are two XMP files with the same name (the file names collide).

People have asked me to support this anyway, because they “know what they are doing”. I may do that, but also understand that in that case, you will lose data if you shoot R+J.

Adobe avoids this by writing XMP data into the JPEG file, but that modifies originals which is risky by definition.

[Nik Bhatt]

Aperture did not have this problem because it maintained its own library format and did not use XMP files (it would only write them out on export). But the world doesn’t need another proprietary library format.

[Nik Bhatt]

I suspect that Nitro is not re-reading the file after you add the metadata. As a result, if it has seen the file and then you add the rating, Nitro won’t see it. If you select the image in Nitro and use Image > Reindex Images, does the rating appear?

I’m thinking of just writing the ratings and such back to the original because having the data partly in the image and partly in XMP is not going to work in the long run.

[Andreas Yankopolus]

I’m not seeing an “Image -> Reindex Images” on the iPad version. When I click on an image and rebuild the thumbnail, the star rating doesn’t update to the value in the HEIC or DNG file for me.

[Nik Bhatt]

For Reindex on iPad, use the Batch button.

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