Re: [Shotwell] Any progress on writing metadata back to Nikon NEF files?

[Michael Hendry <hendry michael gmail com>]

On 30 Sep 2014, at 21:42, Jim Nelson <jim yorba org> wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 12:11 AM, Michael Hendry <hendry michael gmail com> wrote:
> > I have just read about the sidecar files which are used to attach metadata to RAW files - from a position 
> > of ignorance, it looks to me as if this might be a better way of dealing with the issue.
>
> That's a more likely way we'd go if we were to offer writing RAW metadata.
>
> Do you have a suggestion for how the message would look?  "Writing metadata to files (not RAW)" doesn't 
> read very well.
>
> -- Jim

If you look at my original post, you’ll see that Shotwell claimed to have completed writing metadata to a RAW 
file...

L 17293 2014-09-23 11:00:55 [MSG] MetadataWriter.vala:623: Completed writing metadata for [77831] 
/home/michaelhendry/Desktop/Parallels Shared Folders/Home/Pictures/Shotwell Library/2014/09/17/DSC_1969.NEF

…and did this for numerous other NEF files.

Not everyone is going to read a log file, but it might as well be accurate!

What I’d suggest is that when the user switches on the writing of metadata for the first time, a warning 
should come up “Metadata will not be written to RAW files, only to JPGs - Proceed anyway? Yes ~ No”, or 
similar.

“Writing metadata to files (where possible)…” would also indicate that this doesn’t work for all files.


On a more general note, wherever possible I use software that doesn’t lock me in by handling data in a 
specific way. If all my image files were self-sufficient in the sense that they carried all the metadata I’d 
ascribed to them in Shotwell, then I could be confident the I would be able (for example) to split my library 
of images into several independent libraries, administered by Shotwell or by any other program that could 
read the metadata.

Michael