Help starting fresh with iMatch 2020

[godspeedjas]

I've spent way too many months trialing and researching DAM software for my every growing image/video catalog.  i am an amateur photog, just a dad taking pictures/videos of his kids, but of all the software i have used before, imatch, to me, seems the best at what i am looking for...a very customizable tool to organize my digital life.  However, because of its level of customization, it can be a pretty daunting task to understand everything that is "under the hood".  So i am asking forum members the best way for me to "start fresh" with iMatch...

I have been using ACDSee for years, and all my image imports were done via ACDSee importer, which, of course, adds metadata (to its own proprietary XMP tags).  I have even used some of their keywording and rating tools, but not extensively, since they use their own proprietary tags, and i wanted something more portable (like iMatch).

is there a way to setup iMatch so that when i add all my existing photo and video folders (in batches), that it will NOT import any keywords, headlines, titles, ratings, etc...essentially, a clean XMP record with no proprietary tags that ACDSEE or other software that i may have used in the past?

I want to basically start from the beginning of my image archive, and keyword/face tag all my 100,000+ images/videos using iMatch, without any other keywords or other XMP metadata getting in the way (if that makes sense).  I will have the iMatch thesaurus setup with my organized list of keywords, and then devote the next few months/years tackling the keywording challenge...

thanks in advance!

[Mario]

is there a way to setup iMatch so that when i add all my existing photo and video folders (in batches), that it will NOT import any keywords, headlines, titles, ratings, etc.

No. The key point of a DAM is proper metadata management.
But IMatch offers awesome tools to edit and 'fix' metadata. See Working with Metadata

The Metadata Mechanic app is a very powerful tool to set, remove and modify metadata.
It can be used, for example, to salvage metadata ACDSee has stored in proprietary metadata and to move this data into standard metadata fields (keywords, titles, descriptions, ...)

The Metadata Analyst app allows you to have a look at the actual metadata stored in your files, to find problems.

[godspeedjas]

ok, just thought i would ask, just in case i missed something. 

I will get familiar with the tools you listed (specifically the Metadata Mechanic), as i will probably need to do a lot of manipulation. 

Does the feature set of metadata templates also allow the types of changes that MetaData Mechanic does?  It looks like i can replace tags, as well as remove tags using metadata templates, which seems very similar to the Mechanic app...is there a preference as to which one to use in specific situations?

[Mario]

The Metadata Mechanic can do some things Metadata Templates cannot.

But Metadata Templates are very powerful themselves. You can run them automatically when ingesting files, from the IMatch UI, via Favorites, ...