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…

[Author]

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