Rating from IM5 to Lightroom

[christiaan]

Hello everyone,

In IM5 I have photos with a star rating. I use Lightroom. The rating made in Lightroom goes to IM5, but the rating of IM5 does not work vice versa.
How can I fix this?

Wait patiently.
Regards.
Christiaan

[RalfC]

By default, IMatch does not write Metadata (such such ratings) back immediately. Pending Metadata is shown by a yellow pencil on the thumbnail.
Therefore LR can not see the changed rating.

You have two possibilities to get the (changed) rating visible in LR:

• Invoke the Metadata Writeback manually (Commands -> Metadata Writeback -> ... )
• Change the preferences to write Metadata immediately (under Preferences / Background processing)

Regards,
Ralf

[Mario]

IMatch does not write metadata back for performance reasons. Depending on your file format and the size of your files, and whether or not IPTC/EXIF/GPS data needs to be synchronized in addition to XMP, writing back data can be slow. It's thus better to do this only when needed, or to process all files at once while you have other things to do. See also the IMatch Help for more info.

If you process the same files with XMP data in multiple applications, you need to ensure that all involved applications update the XMP data on disk. Otherwise other applications cannot see the data. If modified XMP data still sits inside LR's cache database, IMatch cannot see it. And if you don't process pending XMP updates in IMatch before opening the files in LR, the same happens.

Adobe designed XMP for their own purposes and it lacks any kind of synchronization mechanism. It is easy to overwrite changes made to metadata by other applications. This is the reason, for example, for the protect settings in IMatch (Edit > Preferences > Metadata 2) will allows you to protect unwritten XMP metadata (XMP data changed by IMatch but not yet written) during a re-import. LR does not have a similar mechanism, it is not designed to corporate with other applications (like most Adobe products, sigh).

If this confuses you - welcome. I suggest you read the article Using Adobe® Lightroom and IMatch 5 together in the awesome IMatch Knowledge Base. It explains this and also many other issues you may run into when using LR, PS or other XMP-aware applications.

[christiaan]

Hi Mario,

Thanks for your answer. I understand it is a difficult problem, but I found my way: it works like I want.

Before your answer I have searched the Help and  also in IMatch 5 Knowledgebase Archives. In the Site bar over there I don't see anything about Lightroom. Following your suggestion and the link to Using Adobe Lightroom and IMatch 5 together, I saw on that place in the side bar also no reference. Now I understand that at the bottom of the page in small print you can find a reference for Older post, where I had to find where I'm looking for. Maybe it's a suggestion to include the text Older post on the list in the Site Bar.

Again: thanks for your help.

Regards,
Christiaan.

[Mario]

You can always use the search box on the right to search the photools.com web site. The sidebar only lists the last 10 Blog entires or so, it is generated automatically to show only the most recent posts. I cannot append text to the list but maybe I can improve the title...