I was delighted to see the addition of the Metadata Data panel to Opus 10. This in fact was one of the main reasons that I rushed to buy the upgrade. I was disappointed to discover that there is no support for camera RAW file formats, such as Canon CR2 and Nikon NEF, nor for the Adobe DNG standard. The vast majority of my image files are in camera RAW format, and I expect that this is true for many professional and serious amateur photographers. Are there plans to add full metadata support for camera RAW files, both native and in XMP sidecar format?
We don't currently support editing EXIF data in raw files, though. (That seems dangerous in general, given how undocumented the raw formats are. Maybe it would be possible for DNG and XMP, though.)
The metadata panel currently tends to only show data it can edit, not read-only fields, so it's not currently useful for viewing this data; you have to use the file display columns instead.
BTW, the next update will include updates to our raw image handling to fix some EXIF rotation problems, add support for new cameras and improve handling of some of the old ones.
Playing with these features some more, I now realize that the metadata panel does in fact already display extended metadata from DNG files, and allow it to be edited, which is excellent.
Thanks for the tip on using file display columns. I have now set myself up a new Folder Format Content Type called "RAW Image" for CR2, CRW, NEF, AND DNG file types, and have associated it with column types Tags, Comments and Rating. So now I can also view extended metadata in DNG files this way, and by adding more EXIF columns, the standard EXIF data in any proprietary RAW file, as you have shown.
However, the extended metadata in the XMP sidecar files that are associated with proprietary camera RAW files is not displayed in either the metadata panel or my file display column setup.
For the proprietary raw formats like CR2, I would love to be able to access these extended metadata fields (at least the above mentioned ones) in the metadata pane when a proprietary RAW file is highlighted in the lister, at least when using "Images" view. I agree that it would be quite dangerous to enable direct editing of the proprietary RAW format files. Few RAW converters touch them anymore, to ensure that they stay universally readable by other applications, and so they do all their scribbling in XMP sidecars. Although by default Adobe Lightroom records extended metadata in the catalogue database, it can be set to write XMP sidecars in parallel. (The only exception to the "do not touch" rule that I can think of is that some RAW converters have a function for shifting the "date created" EXIF time stamp, which can be vital when syching images collected from multiple cameras at an event, for instance.)
Having Opus automatically associate proprietary RAW files with their XMP sidecar files, so that when the RAW file is highlighted in the lister, the metadata in the sidecar file is automatically displayed in the metadata panel, and then to be able to edit that metadata in the XMP, would be awesome, and would spare me from having to fire up special applications just to make quick adjustments to this metadata. Any chance of development going in that direction?
I think we do support xmp, but as separate files, so their data isn't currently shown for the associated image, it's shown for the xmp file itself. Haven't double checked this, though.
I'm not very familiar with the exif/xmp code in Opus but your suggestion makes sense to me.
