I have several instances of photos where PS decides to keep the Orientation tag from the picture and ignore the one in the sidecar file. The same happens with keyword tags : old keywords I deleted years ago are coming back.
I use DigiKam and I configured it to write metadata exclusively to the sidecars and never touch the originals. This means that the metadata between the photo file (e.g. the .jpg) and the sidecar (the corresponding .xmp) is not the same and that only the sidecar contains up to date tags.
How does PS resolves tags between a file and its sidecar when they have different values ?
If you can email or DM me those examples, I can work through what’s going on with you. It may be a bug, or it may be working “as designed,” but in any case, PhotoStructure isn’t working for you, so let’s figure out how to fix it.
Values from sidecars are “layered” over the values found in the original asset.
Sidecars are sorted by last-modified-time-last, so most-recently-edited sidecars should get the “final say” for values: but if you, say, delete the Keywords tag from your last .xmp sidecar, and there are several sidecars, the older sidecar’s value won’t be overridden by the newer sidecar.
I try to make PhotoStructure follow the principle of least astonishment: I’m happy to discuss improvements on how to coalesce metadata!
This is interesting to me; I’ve found that JPEG images that have been rotated (in Shotwell) before PhotoStructure saw them haven’t been rotated in PhotoStructure. I just assumed that Shotwell wasn’t storing the information in a place where PS would pick it up, but it seems that’s unlikely from your reply @mrm.
Mentioning it in case it’s related. I’m not in need of a fix as I’m going to move to darktable and am unlikely to continue using Shotwell…
Thanks @mrm. I haven’t been fiddling with photos for a week or two so think the most reliable approach would be for me to wait until I see it again, and then get in touch when I can describe exactly what happened, and in what order I did stuff.