Hierarchical Categories and keywords

[BeVegan]

Can you tell me if hierarchical categories or hierarchical keywords are standard across most DAM so that what I do in Daminion will be correctly read in others? I tested categories and I see Media Pro reads the subcategories with the delimiter | but don't actually show the hierarchy structure. So instead of

 

A

B

C

it sees it as A|B|C

 

Can anyone tell me which of these hierarchical categories or keywords would be more universally compatible with other DAMs? This compatability with other DAMs is a sticking point with me.

 

Also, are there any limits to the number of subcategories or any character limits in the "supplementary catergories" field that would prevent applying many categories tags to 1 picture? Same for keywords?

 

Thanks

[Murat]

Can you tell me if hierarchical categories or hierarchical keywords are standard across most DAM so that what I do in Daminion will be correctly read in others? I tested categories and I see Media Pro reads the subcategories with the delimiter | but don't actually show the hierarchy structure. So instead of

 

A

B

C

it sees it as A|B|C

 

Can anyone tell me which of these hierarchical categories or keywords would be more universally compatible with other DAMs? This compatability with other DAMs is a sticking point with me.

 

XMP/MWG authors made things complicated and added separate fields to support for hierarchical tags that seems nobody wanted to support.

 

However the "|" symbol has been unofficially adopted by many software programs including Daminion, Microsoft WLG, LR, MediaPro (Expression Media/iView) and others.

 

MediaPro also understands this delimiter, but the hierarchical keyword structure will be visible in the additional panel named Hierarchical Keywords. Their regular Keywords panel displays the flat keyword structure only.

 

However the above mentioned DAM systems are limited with hierarchical keywords only, while Daminion supports hierarchical tag structure for categories, events, people, etc... without breaking the XMP rules (thanks to the "|" delimiter)

 

 

Also, are there any limits to the number of subcategories or any character limits in the "supplementary catergories" field that would prevent applying many categories tags to 1 picture? Same for keywords?

 

There are no limitation for a number of nested levels (except 4 levels for the Place tag). However Daminion can optionally write tags into the IPTC/EXIF to provide compatibility with old programs and services. But IPTC has significant limitations to the length of the writing annotations:

 

By-line, Supplemental Category, City, Location, State - maximum 32 symbols

Keywords, Title, Country - maximum 64 symbols

Headline (mapped to the Title tag) - maximum 256 symbols

Copyright Notice - maximum 128 symbols

Caption (mapped to the Description tag) - maximum 2000 symbols

 

XMP doesn't have such limitations and Daminion can correctly handle truncated IPTC fields.

 

Read also my article: Hierarchical Keywords in Lightroom. Be Careful!

[Phloid]

Murat, when you say "symbols" as related to the IPTC limitations, are you referring to characters or to something different?

[Murat]

Yep, by symbols I meant characters. Please also take into account that Adobe XMPToolKit saves IPTC strings encoded as UTF8 using 2 characters. So the above limitations can be even increased two times!

 

Anyway, IPTC is an outdated specification. We support it to just providing backward compatibility with old programs and services.