refresh attributes when IPTC/XML-metadata was changed

[kkiel]

Hi everybody,

in IMatch 3 there has been a feature to automatically link metadata of different kinds: When I changed something in the IPTC-Data, say 'headline', IMatch automatically changed this in the attribute 'headline', when I linked them before.
I have not been able to find this functionality in IMatch5 - did I miss it?

Thank you very much!

kkiel

[Ferdinand]

The short answer is that this is not needed in IMatch 5.

This facility was used in IMatch 3.6 a long long time ago, before there was XMP.  It was the only practical way to search in IPTC - it wasn't practical to search in each and every file so the information had to be cached in the database somehow, and properties was the way to do it.  You could set it up to automatically update properties whenever IPTC was edited.

Then XMP came along and was also cached in the DB.  IMatch 3.6 updated XMP from IPTC.  At this point the properties that mirrored IPTC were no longer needed, since the same information could be searched and accessed from XMP.  In fact keeping the properties that mirrored IPTC unnecessarily increased the size of the DB, since the same information was being cached twice.  So at that point the facility that you're talking about was already redundant.

This is even more true in IMatch 5 - XMP is now the primary point of metadata entry, and IMatch replicates it in IPTC (for those file types that have IPTC writing enabled).  The information you entered is searachable and fully accessible in all areas of IMatch, so you don't need it in attributes, and putting it there will unnecessarily increase the size of the DB.

Is there some other reason why you think you need to import IPTC into attributes?

[kkiel]

Thank you very much, Ferdinand!

I asked this because I used the attributes to store metadata in different languages next to each other, say german headline, english headline, french headline ... I always kept the attributes fresh, not the IPTC data.
Only when I shipped the files to a customer I wrote the metadata into the file produced for shipping, in the language he wanted. I also have some scripts importing the metadata in all languages from the attributes to a csv-file that I can then import to other applications. As it looks, I should store the German headline etc. data in IPTC/XML, but all the other languages in attributes. Like this I also always have to switch between panels when correcting a simple typo or something like that that occurs in all languages.
I havn't looked into IMatch5-Multi-languages features yet, is there a way to store same informations (titles, headlines, keywords ...) in different languages on the same level?

Thank you very much,

kkiel

[Mario]

I havn't looked into IMatch5-Multi-languages features yet, is there

Although multi-language for some XMP fields is part of the specification, I mostly disabled it in IMatch 5 again. There are so many incompatibilities in other applications (e.g. applications stripping all non-neutral / non-en XMP data on save) that it's really not worth to support it at this time. Dealing with multi-language XMP data can cause so many headaches, I would not go there. IMatch cannot assist you with that. The entire multi-lang stuff in XMP is in flux still.

IMatch 5 has no feature to automatically copy metadata into Attributes. There is a script which can do that (Copy Metadata into Attributes) but this script will not be triggered automatically when you change any of the over 10,000 metadata fields supported by IMatch 5. To implement your very specific workflow you will either run the script manually from time to time, or use other ways.

[kkiel]

Hi Mario, thank you for your reply!

I'll find a way and I surely can write my german XML-data back into attributes - but is my workflow really so special? How do all the other photographers out there deal with metadata that different agencies want in different languages? I think it is very sensible to keep languages apart, f.e. latin, german, english and french name of a plant or animal to combine them as wanted (latin name + englisch name; latin name + german name, ...). Most image librariries restrict the lengh of titles or headlines so you cannot simply write them all into one field.
For me it was a very convenient workflow to simply avoid the language restrictions of IPTC/XML, keep metadata in the attributes only and write them to IPTC only when needed. Of course search was slower ...

Regards,

kkiel

[Mario]

The problem only ever arises for photographers working with international clients, and these clients really want language-specific metadata. This does not happen too often.

For your case, the problem seems to only arise when you deliver aka export a file. I would look in a Metadata Template for this purpose. A Metadata Template allows you to copy data from a variable into a metadata tag. Since the source can be a variable, you can access one of your language specific attributes as the source, and copy the data into a tag. E.g. copy a description in the "en" Attribute to the XMP description. IMatch from there copies it into IPTC on write-back automatically. If you make one metadata template for each language, you can run it even as a Favorite.

[kkiel]

Thanks, Mario!

[Ferdinand]

Another demonstration of how metadata templates have replaced a lot of scripts!