Problems with Category and Keyword (tag) Mapping with ACDSee

[Greenfrog]

I am experimenting and testing Daminion, and trying to work out how to use it alongside ACDSee. I have tested enough to discover the highly unintuitive metadata-mapping that Daminion uses. I eventually found the metadata mapping file that confirms what I discovered by testing: Daminion reads Category and Keyword (and other) tags from multiple fields (including the ones ACDSee uses), but only writes them to specific fields (that are not the same fields that they are read from). This has the potential to create major problems. I have Daminion set to embed tags within the files. In ACDSee, I 'embed ACDSee metadata' and 'Catalog' files to extract the metadata.

Example Problem 1: If I create a Category in ACDSee and apply it to a file, this will show up in Daminion. If I apply this same tag to a second file in Daminion, it will write it into a different field. So, now I have the 'same' tag in two different fields. Daminion shows them both as if they were the same tag. ACDSee only recognizes the original one as an actual Category, and shows the Daminion-created one in IPTC:SupplementalCategories. Daminion has forked the original Category, into two copies of the same tag, but in different metadata fields! WHAT A MESS!

Example Problem 2: If I create and assign a Category using ACDSee, and then 'delete' that category from the file in Daminion, it will disappear from Daminion, but the original ACDSee-Category remains unchanged, and is still present in the file. Rescanning Daminion does not re-populate the category in Daminion (even though it is still present in a field Daminion reads), and as far as I can tell it is 'lost forever' without any way of knowing there is a ghost tag in the metadata that Daminion is artificially hiding.

Is there a way to allow these two applications to share tags in a functional way? Can the metadata mapping be changed so that Daminion writes into the ACDSee fields to keep things full coordinated?

I kind-of understand the logic behind reading multiple tag fields and displaying them all as-if they are a single tag. However, the inability (and lack of transparency) as to which fields are being written to seems like a major shortcoming (at best). I hope I'm missing something, as this seems very problematic for my use case.

Thanks,

[Uwe]

Hello,
is it possible for you to attach a sample ACDSee file here?
From my point of view, Daminion is not "backwards" compatible. Even if tags written by other programmes are read, this does not mean that "foreign formats" are also written. This leads to the situation you describe. From my point of view, Daminion writes metadata that is as "Adobe Lightroom compatible" as possible - custom tags excluded.
Regarding your example 2: Do I understand correctly? The category created in ACDSee was imported correctly into Daminion. Then you deleted it in Daminion. The category was deleted from the metadata that Daminion had created, but not from the ACDSee metadata. Now you expected that a new Rescan from Folders would read the ACDSee category again? Did you try to remove the file from the catalogue before the immediate Rescan Folders - don't delete it from the disk! and then start a Rescan Folders?
Regards, Uwe