ExifTool Custom Config - XMP Metadata

[Slowboat]

I have been searching thru to community forum looking for solution and documentation on how to take an existing ExifTool custom configuration that I normally use with standalone ExifTool and get the configuration to work with IMatch.  My search effort has only furthered my interest as I find only posts referencing ExifTool documentation , but not on how to enable IMatch with the custom config.

I am very familiar with ExifTool and have contributed to decoding and providing maker notes data to lenses and other undocumented data.  I understand how to create and have created custom defined XMP namespaces that I use with ExifTool to generate metadata that is important to me in managing my image assets.  I work both with digital images, analog film, scans of film, scans of prints. Each print has detailed notes that document chemistry used and amounts for print, exposure times, relative humidity, temperature, UV dosage, and much more.  This is all defined in several custom XMP namespaces that ExifTool readily handles in my workflow today.

The million dollar question is how to get IMatch to recognize these XMP Fields. As I trial, I added my custom ExifTool configuration to the existing imatch_et.config file then the ExifTool Command Processor recognizes them.  I get do a -list and -listw and -listg1 am able to find my custom defined fields.  In the Metadata - Browser I can see the customer fields shown within a section labeled as UserDefined::FilmProcessConfig as en example.  However, when attempting to create a custom panel these tags are not available.

Questions:
1. What is the supported way of configuring custom XMP metadata for the ExifTool version used by IMatch
2. How can those fields be used to create a custom Metadata panel

[Mario]

IMatch does not support custom ExifTool configuration files or non-standard custom metadata tags.
This is so special that I don't spend development time on this. IMatch uses ExifTool for almost 5 years now, and you are the first user ever requesting this.

If you have such special requirements I recommend using ExifTool directly for this purpose.
If you think that user-defined metadata tags is something that is of interest for a sufficiently large group of IMatch users, please feel free to add a feature request in the feature request board.

[Slowboat]

Completely understand that the workflow and metadata used is not of a large community interest, but would be of interest to the small niche of photographers/artist that still work in the analog darkroom and are making alternative process images.

Would a better to a solution is approach Phil and have my XMP namespaces added to ExifTool.  If these XMP namespaces were added as part of the standard ExifTool distribution would IMatch properly pick the up?

Looking for options that would be supported and integrated into IMatch as part of a image management workflow that enables capture and management of metadata related to the process of producing the image.  I am more than happy to look at extensiblity options support by IMatch and ExifTool and accomplish this.

Cheers,
David

[Mario]

If these XMP namespaces were added as part of the standard ExifTool distribution would IMatch properly pick the up?

Yes. But I would vote against adding more proprietary or even user-specific XMP namespaces to ExifTool. This would lead to chaos in no time. Metadata is a mess as it is already.

Supporting user-defined XMP namespaces in IMatch would probably not be that hard.
IMatch would need to know where to find the custom configuration file with the user-defined properties. It would need to reference this file in all code parts which use ExifTool (reading, writing, scanning) and keep track of changes of the file so it can trigger a re-import of all tags (so the tags become known to IMatch and show up in the Tag selector dialog etc.).

Then I would need to figure out pitfalls and side effects, how to deal with error caused by this (for example, tags removed from the config file, existing tags changed to other types or formats in later versions of the config file etc.). Adding error handling and user feedback, documenting all this stuff, writing a help topic that explains how to use it etc. That alone can generate several days of work up-front and probably later 'complex' support cases...

It is doable but as I said, I wonder if more than a handful of users ever will see use for this.

Fee free to add a feature request here in the community so we can see how many users are interested.
There are a lot of pre-made XMP namespaces to choose from already, and my impression is that most users can store all they need in one or more of these.