Saving file from PSPPX3 removes rating from Win Photo Galler

[lionel]

When I got X3 I checked out the photo Organiser hoping it would be an all in one image solution for me. It would not recognise tags I had added in Win Photo Gallery and because I had heaps of pics I decided to stick with Photo Gallery. That leaves me with another problem with ratings though. If I have a star rating on a file in Photo Gallery and open the file in PSPPX3 the rating disappears once I save the file again - even if I have made no alterations. Frustrating - I have to remember to re-rate any files I process. The rating is preserved in the PSP Organiser but has gone from Photo Gallery.

It is also interesting that whereas tags added in PSPPX3 are recognised in Photo Gallery, the converse is not the case.

I don't mind not using PSP Organiser, I bought the program for the editor, but I wish PSP would not interfere with the things other organisers are using. I presume it is part of the EXIF data.

Any solutions would be appreciated.

[LeviFiction]

Tags and ratings are considered photographer data and so is saved as IPTC not EXIF. EXIF can be considered the data written by the camera or the application you are using. PSP has been horrible about reading the IPTC data of files. And only actually supports it in the organizer. In the editor IPTC data is ignored and so isn't read in and subsequently isn't written out. That is why Photo Gallery can read PSP's tags but it can't do the same. Also why tags vanish.

If you can get an organizer that uses its own database instead of writing IPTC to the file you won't have to worry about this lack of support from PSP. Of course only JPEG and uncompressed TIFF files actually support IPTC anyway but you get the idea.

One question though, did you save the united JPEG just as a test or so you actually do that? Because you should only ever save it after edits. Resaving a loss format like that only invites more damage.