Keywords are sometimes visible, sometimes not

[David Ivester]

I assigned keywords some months back to a bunch of scanned photos on an external hard drive. I recently copied the scans, which are collected in a series of folders, to my PC internal hard drive using File Explorer (a mistake, I gather). Now, when I open the scan files on the external hard drive or on my PC internal hard drive, the keywords (both ACDSee and IPTC) do not appear. If, however, I keyword search for photos using one of the assigned keywords, I retrieve a group of photos with the searched keyword and all the other assigned keywords visible in the metadata, along with notes, descriptions, etc. So . . . it seems the keywords and other metadata are "in there" somewhere, but just don't show up unless coaxed by a search. Any thoughts about what is going on and how I can restore the keywords so they always appear in the metadata of each photo? I'd like to avoid repeating the effort of assigning keywords to all the photos anew, and I worry that if I do that, the existing keywords, wherever they are, may somehow gum up the works.

[Greyfox]

I assigned keywords some months back to a bunch of scanned photos on an external hard drive. I recently copied the scans, which are collected in a series of folders, to my PC internal hard drive using File Explorer (a mistake, I gather). Now, when I open the scan files on the external hard drive or on my PC internal hard drive, the keywords (both ACDSee and IPTC) do not appear. If, however, I keyword search for photos using one of the assigned keywords, I retrieve a group of photos with the searched keyword and all the other assigned keywords visible in the metadata, along with notes, descriptions, etc. So . . . it seems the keywords and other metadata are "in there" somewhere, but just don't show up unless coaxed by a search. Any thoughts about what is going on and how I can restore the keywords so they always appear in the metadata of each photo? I'd like to avoid repeating the effort of assigning keywords to all the photos anew, and I worry that if I do that, the existing keywords, wherever they are, may somehow gum up the works.

When you do a search, the thumbnail and the metadata you may see, is likely from the database records, and may relate to the image where it was originally located. If that is the case, and the original drive is not connected, if you double click on the thumbnail, you will likely see a message that the image is located on an unmounted drive.

When you use a 3rd party app (and by 3rd party I mean any app other than ACDSee, and that includes Windows file Explorer) to copy, delete, move or rename folders or files, ACDSee will not know you have done that, and it will not record those changes to its database records. ACDSee uses the Volume Serial Number of the drive in its records of the file locations, and the Volume Serial Number is, or should be, unique to each drive, so even if you use the same drive letter, and the same folder names etc, the original database entries will not relate to the images on the new drive.

The extent of the problem and the best way forward depends on a number of things.

(a) Whether the ACDSee metadata was embedded in the images. While I strongly recommend doing this, it is not done by default, you have to have opted to do it. IPTC metadata is automatically written to the images, but not so ACDSee metadata. And in the case of IPTC, it is only written into formats that support IPTC, and its functionality is not always the same as for ACDSee metadata (for example IPTC keywords don't support hierarchy) .

If you have been embedding the ACDSee metadata, then at least for the formats that support direct embedding, the ACDSee metadata should still be in the images, and both it and the IPTC metadata could be read back from the images and written into the database using Tools/Database/Catalog files. Note however that this would most likely result in new entries being created for the images at the current location, and will leave the original entries for them at the previous locations.

(b) Even if your practice has been to religiously embed the ACDSee metadata, for any of the file formats that don't support direct embedding (for example RAW images) then the metadata is placed in sidecar (xmp) files which in ACDSee are directly linked to their parent folder.If that linkage has been broken, or the xmp files are no longer present, then the information that was in them may potentially be lost. There is also a possible issue of any hidden [Original] and [Developed] folders.

If you haven't been embedding the metadata, and the ACDSee metadata is only present in the database itself then you may possibly be able to use use the Database Maintenance Change Binding function to rebind the folders entries from the old drive to the new drive.

Note though that in the meantime, when you browse the files on the new drive using ACDSee, it will create new entries in the database for them. If there is metadata embedded in the images, ACDSee will read some but NOT all of it and write it into the new database record for that file. Importantly it will NOT read back embedded keywords from just browsing. That has to be done using the Catalog process.

If the images on the external drive are still where they were originally then when that drive is connected, ACDSee should be able to see the metadata when you select the thumbnail of an image (but make sure you are selecting an image that is actually on the external drive, not the copy on the local drive.)

If that is the case, and you need to be sure that it is before proceeding, then one possible solution would be to use ACDSee to delete all of the copies if the images that are on the local drive (to make sure any database entries that have been created for them by browsing are removed from the database), and then with ACDSee closed, recopy them again using Windows File Explorer from the external drive onto the local drive. Once you have done that, disconnect the external drive, open ACDSee and without browsing any of them, use the Tools/Database/Database Maintenance Change binding to rebind the folders from the unmounted external drive to the folders on the local drive. But before doing that, make sure you make a backup copy of the current database using Tools/Database/Backup database

Without a whole lot of quite specific information, that is the best I can come up with for now.

[David Ivester]

Wow! Thank you for your incredibly knowledgeable, detailed, and helpful response. I earlier mentioned to my wife that I had resorted to this forum for help and noted that I had in the past observed that a number of experienced hands regularly took the trouble to help to others, often newbies with sometimes boneheaded questions. Your response epitomizes the helpful culture of this forum. Thank you.