I’ve just released version 1.44 of my Syncomatic plug-in which synchronizes the metadata of files with matching names.

The change is a “Merge Keywords” checkbox which replaces one called “total keyword sync” which sneaked into 1.43 but didn’t do anything except provoke a few puzzled emails. “Merge Keywords” works, and I hope it’s a more intuitive name for the feature.

So what does it do? Well, Syncomatic usually operates by overwriting metadata in the target files, so it would take the rating, label, caption, keywords etc from the source image and make the target image the same. So in the screenshot, img1234.dng’s keywords would replace whatever keywords are img1234.jpg.

But what if you want the DNG’s keywords to be added to those in the corresponding JPEG, and vice versa? That’s what “Merge Keywords” does – copies the DNG’s keywords to the matching JPEG, and copies the JPEG’s keywords back to the DNG. So the final result is the matching pictures have identical keywords combining those in the target with those in the source files.

I’ll probably do another update to include an “Add Keywords” checkbox which will add the source file keywords to those in the target, but won’t copy those in the target. What do you think? Anything else that might be worth adding?