Table of Contents       4. Organize your catalogs in NeoFinder


4.9 Rate your photos

A truly great way to organise your large photo collection with NeoFinder is the use of star ratings.

NeoFinder fully supports the industry standard Adobe XMP (e
xtensible metadata platform) for these ratings, both in cataloging and also in editing.

You can set this rating for one or multiple selected items:



Another very quick way to add or change the rating for the selected item(s) is to use the keyboard. The keys 0 thru 5 are used for this.

Of course, the new expanded XMP editor in the Inspector of NeoFinder not only displays the rating, but also allows you to change it, by clicking or sliding into the rating stars. That works for a single, or even multiple selected items!



The ratings can displayed as a column in the List View, if you have activated this column in the View Settings. You can also sort this column, just like all other columns.



The Icon View can show your ratings, if you activate the
View Options for that.

The Icon View, Column View, and the new Details View can all be sorted by the ratings as well, just use the expanded Sort by menu at the bottom of these three views, and select Ratings there. And remember that this will revert the sort order if selected twice. Quite useful, actually.



After you have added and edited the star ratings for your photos, NeoFinder can help you quickly find them for you! The Find Editor has several options for ratings, and as usual, you can save any such Find setup as a Smart Folder. This way, you can see all your items with a specific rating with just a single click.



Quickly use the Display Filter to show only items with a certain rating, or a rating range.


Notes about the NeoFinder XMP Editor:

Internal and external XMP
NeoFinder writes the XMP data directly into the data file, if the format is supported by Adobes XMP library. Currently this includes these file kinds: JPG, PNG, DNG, MOV, AVI, TIFF, PDF, PSD, INDD, and AI.

For all other items, NeoFinder will generate a separate XMP file, called the “xmp sidecar file”. It will have the same name as the original data file, but the “.xmp” file name suffix instead of the original file name suffix.

Online only
As NeoFinder will write all changes you make to the XMP data directly to disk, this will only work for files that are currently online.

NeoFinder will not just keep your previous data in its own catalog, but write it to disk, so that other applications in your workflow can access this data immediately. No need to additionally use some kind of “write to disk” command or such.

But this will also mean that the XMP editor is only displayed for cataloged items that are actually currently online on your computer.


More
13.1 The XMP Editor
13.3 Metadata Presets