Metadata and Sorting People Images

[Dronenz]

This is a cheap single post for two questions.

Question 1.

I watched an ACDSee video about the use of metadata, from it I took one single probably one important thing and that was that you should update the metadata for each image when it is created ie face recognition data plus other data. If you take an existing repository of images that have recently been catalogued by ACDSee and had face recognition applied, my understanding is that all the data is currently in the ACDSee database, nothing has changed on the image file. The recommendation is that those metadata changes should be written to the image file/files to ensure that if anything happens to the database the data is not lost. Can these changes be applied to the whole image repository in one go (100,000 plus images). The other point is that if you do make the changes any backup program you currently use will need to backup every image that gets changed again.

Question 2

I said it was a cheap post.. In Tools/Manage People it is possible to select all the folders catalogued and subselect a single person. In my trial set up this produces over a 1000 images of a single person over a period of three years, if I continue this process I will end up with a collection spanning twenty years and many more than a 1000 images for my subjects. Do the images display in chronological order and or can they be rearranged to display in a chronological or reverse chronological order.

[Greyfox]

Question 1.

The recommendation is that those metadata changes should be written to the image file/files to ensure that if anything happens to the database the data is not lost. Can these changes be applied to the whole image repository in one go (100,000 plus images). .

You can elect to embed ACDSee metatada into all the images in your collection at the one time. Actually it will only write the files that have the Embed pending flag set (where there is metadata to be embedded).

If that is potentially 100k plus images though, then I personally would not do it in one go. If the process gets derailed for any reason, it is much easier to resolve the problem if it is done in smaller batches, but that is up to you.

...if you do make the changes any backup program you currently use will need to backup every image that gets changed again.

Yes, those files that support direct embedding of the metadata will change, and where the format doesn't support direct embedding, for instance RAW, the embed process produces sidecar xmp files, so your backups will need to be updated, but that applies to any files you change, or edit.

.. In Tools/Manage People it is possible to select all the folders catalogued and subselect a single person. In my trial set up this produces over a 1000 images of a single person over a period of three years, if I continue this process I will end up with a collection spanning twenty years and many more than a 1000 images for my subjects. Do the images display in chronological order and or can they be rearranged to display in a chronological or reverse chronological order.

In that particular (People) mode No.There is currently no provision for the user to order the display of the face thumbnails. People mode is a feature introduced in the 2022 version, so hopefully it will be enhanced over time.

In the meantime, in Manage mode, if you use the "People" section of the Catalog Tab, you can "Quick Select" a single person, and that will display all of the images where that persons face has been identified. The order those images are displayed is controlled by the settings in the Sort menu, and/or the Group menu. So you can for example select to have them displayed ordered by the "Date Taken", or using a custom sort by the "Database date". There is also the additional options of "Sort Forward" and "Sort Backwards"

Keep in mind that you can have images that have Face ID, but have no EXIF information, so no "Date/Time original", and if you use "Date Taken" to order the images, those will not be ordered correctly.

[Dronenz]

Thanks for the response. Hopefully as more people raise "improvements" ACDSee will see a benefit in some of them as future additions.