thesaurus and language synonyms

[rainforest1155]

Hi IMatch friends,

I just started to dip my feet into using hierarchical keywords and the thesaurus today. My first use case for keywords is to specify animals in my photos. I was thinking of a structure like this:
animals|primates|lion-tailed macaque

That was pretty straight forward until I also wanted to make use of the synonym feature to automatically have German keywords added as well. At first I only added the animal's name in German keeping the neutral language setting, which resulted in this keyword getting added:
animals|primates|Bartaffe

Not liking this, I decided to give the language setting a try and to classify all my German synonyms as "de". removed the neutral German synonyms I added and set up my synonyms with the "de" language:
Tiere|Primaten|Bartaffe

However, that resulted in the synonyms no longer getting added or showing up in the keyword panel. I do have the keyword panel settings set to "show synonyms" and "suggest keywords from thesaurus".

I even tried setting all my English keywords to "en" language, but it didn't help with the German keywords populating.

Is there anything I'm doing wrong?

While testing this, I also used the "import thesaurus" feature in the thesaurus manager. I first exported my thesaurus to a imths file, made some edits to the XML and then imported it back, only selecting the "keywords" thesaurus and choosing the replace option since I wanted to clear our the existing keyword thesaurus. I expected the import would only touch the keyword thesaurus as this was the only one I selected, but instead, it cleared out all other thesauri as well.
Is that supposed to happen? The only situation I could imagine wanting to do this, would be if I wanted to clear out the entire thesaurus in my database. If this is really working as it should, I'm not able to find any warning about it.

I've attached a screenshot of the import screen and I also attached the imths file I imported.

Thanks for any ideas or suggestions you can offer.

Sebastian

EDIT: I'm using the latest IMatch 5.4.8.

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[Mario]

However, that resulted in the synonyms no longer getting added or showing up in the keyword panel.

IMatch shows only metadata in the language currently configured for your database (Edit > Preferences > Metadata). Please read the associated help text and especially the comments on languages and the lack of support in most applications out there.

As I wrote in the help, language support, albeit part of the XMP specification, is not really supported out there. Many applications even remove XMP data not in the neutral language.

For now, stick to the neutral language.
Just add your de synonyms in the neutral language as well, if you want IMatch to add them automatically.
I don't really want to go all over this again, we had our share of discussions during the Beta test phase. For now, neutral language ("fits all") is best.

[rainforest1155]

I don't really want to go all over this again, we had our share of discussions during the Beta test phase. For now, neutral language ("fits all") is best.

Fair enough. I'd be interested in reading up on the past discussions. Is there any way for me to look at the discussions from the beta test? I tried to view the beta forum on the old ptforum but it said it's restricted. Could you perhaps grant me access to that on the old forum? Username is the same as here.

In case you didn't read the entire post, the last part is about the thesaurus manager and importing a thesaurus. Could you or anyone else verify that it's supposed to work that way? If so, is there any warning in the UI or help that I missed?

Thanks,
Sebastian

[Mario]

An IMTHS file can contain thesaurus data for multiple tags. If you import such a thesaurus, all data for the tags covered by the thesaurus will be replaced/added.

To produce an IMTHS file for one tag, remove all data for the tags you don't want to import, then run the export. Make sure to close the thesaurus manager with Cancel to prevent the modified thesaurus from being saved. See also the thesaurus manager help topic in the IMatch help which explains this in more detail.

[rainforest1155]

An IMTHS file can contain thesaurus data for multiple tags. If you import such a thesaurus, all data for the tags covered by the thesaurus will be replaced/added.

To produce an IMTHS file for one tag, remove all data for the tags you don't want to import, then run the export. Make sure to close the thesaurus manager with Cancel to prevent the modified thesaurus from being saved. See also the thesaurus manager help topic in the IMatch help which explains this in more detail.

I just tried the import with a IMTHS file that only contains the keyword tag. When I imported it and chose to replace the existing content, and after saving the thesaurus, the thesaurus for all other tags was gone, just leaving the keywords tag.
I attached the IMTHS file that I tried this with and also included a screenshot of the tags for my database in the thesaurus manager after I had saved the changes following the import.

From what you describe, this appears to be a bug with the import feature. Do you wish me to create a new thread for that in the bug forum?

Sebastian

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[Mario]

The replace thesaurus option is global, if affects all entries.
This enables you to flush your current thesaurus entirely, then importing the checked elements from the file to re-fill it.

Use the merge option to add the entries of the checked element to your existing thesaurus.
You can delete the entries in Keywords (or whatever other tag you are processing) before merging the new elements in, effectively replacing all your keywords with the keywords from the IMTHS file.

This behavior is by design and unchanged for two years. These choices enable you to perform all required thesaurus operations: replace, merge all, selective merge.

Note that importing an IMTHS file is usually done once in the entire lifetime of a database, except maybe for backup or exchange purposes and then it's usually all entries, not selective tags.

If you think that the help is not clear enough, click on the "feedback" link at the bottom of the corresponding help topic and request a change / addition.