How to make the metadata and keywords visible to other programs?

How to make the metadata and keywords visible to other programs?

When adding photos, Excire Foto reads the metadata and automatically adds keywords to them after analysis. (When adding, the "Load keywords from analyzed photos" option must be enabled in the program settings. This is not active by default).
After that, you can continue to maintain the keywords and metadata manually, add your own keywords, add or change metadata, etc.

Basic information about saving metadata

All information is initially only available within the Excire Foto database.
If you want to make keywords and metadata available to other applications, you will need to save them to the photos using the menu command "Store Metadata".
There are settings that can be used to adapt the behavior of Excire Foto to the way other programs work.
Metadata can be saved either directly in the files or as a separate file (so-called filial files or sidecar files) in .xmp format.
These xmp files basically have the same name as the associated photo file, only with the extension ".xmp".
Metadata can only be saved directly in some file formats (e.g. JPG and PNG), but RAW files do not offer this possibility. Here it is always necessary to save in .xmp format. This is not a limitation of the software, but specified by the RAW format.

Save metadata during export

In the export dialog there is an option to save metadata with the new photos on output or not ("Save metadata for exported photos").

Settings in Excire Foto regarding metadata

For most users, the default settings in Excire Foto are fine. Advanced users can customize Excire Foto to fit their workflow with other programs.

Always use sidecar files

In the program settings in the Excire Foto -> Preferences menu, in the "Metadata" tab, you will find the option to use filial files for all file types, even if they would allow saving metadata directly.
This setting is recommended only for advanced users who work with programs that also exclusively use branch files for metadata or offer a corresponding setting option.

Append metadata array content

If this setting is activated, metadata will be appended to existing metadata when saving, i.e. will be added to it. Otherwise, existing metadata will be overwritten with the new information when saving. The latter is the default setting and is recommended for most users.

Setting for color markers in the "Label" tab

Many programs, like Excire Foto, offer the possibility to mark photos with colors and stars. While the star rating is stored internationally uniformly as a number from 1 to 5, the color rating depends on the language used (red, yellow, green, blue, purple).
Excire Foto uses German or English as the default language here, depending on the user's language.
If color markers are not visible after saving in another program, it may be because that program has stored the color markers in a different language. In this case, you can adjust them in Excire Foto.

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