Improve Capture One

Request a new feature, or support for a camera/lens that you would like to use in Capture One.

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Status Awaiting review
Workspace Feature requests
Categories Capture One Pro
Created by Jean-Marie Belloteau
Created on Dec 17, 2024

RELATED IDEAS

Add an option save embed metadata not only XMP sidecar

In Capture One, it’s possible to load metadata from a picture by using an embedded data or XMP sidecar file while metadata can only be written to XMP sidecar file.

To address this issue, a toggle could be added to the Capture One preferences to enable a new option: save embedded metadata.

This would prevent conflicts in metadata.

Thank you.

Current workaround

The only workaround is to use another app to edit metadata, which is quite inconvenient.
  • Post comment
  • Patrick Regan
    Reply
    |     Dec 29, 2024

    I second this feature request, and would offer that there really isn't much in terms of work-arounds, currently. Not being able to read and write embedded metadata is especially problematic for psd and tiff files. It almost makes storing psd/tiff files in C1 a bad idea.


    Use case example:

    I want to round-trip example.nef to Photoshop. C1 will embed whatever metadata was associated with example.nef into example.psd upon export. Let's say that my color tag for example.nef was red. example.psd will also have a color tag of red. If I want to change the color tag of example.psd to green after I'm done editing it, when I change the tag, the color for example.nef will also change to green. Why? Because C1 only looks for XMP files, and by design XMP will apply to all files with the same name, but it only contains one set of data (in other words, if you have example.nef, example.psd, and example.tiff in the same directory with example.xmp, whatever is in example.xmp is associated with all the other files; XMP only contains one <label> tag).

    OK, so I could get creative and rename my psd file to example-edited.psd. If I change the color tag on example-edited.psd from red to green, it's going to change to green and leave example.nef as red. This looks like success! Except, if I look at example-edited.psd in Photo Mechanic (e.g.), it's still going to appear read. Why? Because Photo Mechanic (and Bridge and Windows Explorer, and...) are all looking at the file's embedded metadata, and not the example-edited.xmp file that C1 created. It's not even an option in these other DAMs to ignore embedded metadata in favor of sidecars. C1 is the only player that I know of who uses this xmp-over-embedded-for-everything approach.


    Work-around: the only real option is to go all-in on using C1 for DAM (cataloging) - no Bridge, no Photo Mechanic, no Lightroom, not even the native file system. This is...so-so as C1 arguably isn't the best DAM available. It also adds extra steps for collaborating with others ("did I remember to manually update the metadata in those other files before sending them to the client?" "did I remember to manually update metadata changes my colleague might have made when they did edits outside of C1?", etc.)