taken from the “what’s next” page.
(Edit 20210413: Note that this feature used to be called “Support for manually editing tags”, but in this context, we meant “keywords”: feel free to re-vote accordingly!)
Related:
Here’s a recent reply I made to reddit:
Howdy!
Metadata editing is absolutely going to be supported …
The next thing you should ask is: dude, why aren’t you done with that yet? (possibly without the California interjection).
Oh man, am I glad you asked!
Editing metadata is trivial for one file: I tell ExifTool to make the change, and it happens.
But PhotoStructure’s assets are backed by one or more asset file “variants” due to de-duping.
If, say, you delete a keyword from an asset, and one of the volumes that you’ve scanned into your library is unmounted, PhotoStructure won’t be able to comprehensively fix all variants to not have that keyword anymore. The next time you mount that volume, PhotoStructure sync will check the formerly-missing variant, and the deleted keyword will be re-added to the asset. The same issue would happen if you newly import an old backup that has a variant of this asset with the old list of keywords.
To handle this, PhotoStructure will also persist a set of time-stamped “operations,” or “transforms” (very similar to a CRDT), which it can then aggregate and “replay” when that asset is being re-imported, to ensure that user edits don’t get quietly reverted.
(These will be stored in a sidecar, by default, just like all other metadata edits, but you’ll be able to make metadata changes directly to the original file, if you understand the risks and don’t like sidecars).
2 Likes
I know this is the second highest voted for feature, but I wanted to add context as to why it’s so important for me.
My biggest challenge over the years has been videos. I used to import them into LR Classic and tag, but as iPhone cameras got better my video content generated via mobile ballooned and I ran into a problem. A lot of my videos were in Photos / iCloud, and the workflow of getting them into LR was anything but clean. On top of that, LR just sucked for managing the videos. My catalog was on the verge of collapse regularly.
The biggest single problem with videos has been the lack of metadata or tagging. Bridge is useless for video in my book, and apps like Photos don’t do me any good because I generate a lot of video off my phone (DSLRs, drones, video cameras, you name it). Photo Structure appears to be filling that gap, and the auto-tagging alone based on date and camera type is massive. I’ll happily tag all my videos manually, and being able to do so would be the final step in creating the video management workflow I’ve wanted for years.
4 Likes
@mrm clarification question: in your view does this request cover adding hierarchical tags? Or is it simply adding single-level tags to the parent tag “keyword”?
Good idea to clarify: albums, person names, and keywords can all be stored within the Keywords tag (and some 8 other tags as well).
The ux I’m thinking will allow adding and removing arbitrary hierarchical tags, so it should cover at least those 3 flavors of tags.
Cool… I was curious if this would get you most of the way to album support, and your reply confirms that. Glad to hear it!!