I'm looking for a solution to quickly sorting and rating moderate (mid hundreds; at least I don't have to cope with 15,000 images from a weekend like the other poster elsewhere on this board!) numbers of images, making web jpegs, applying IPTC data, and filing them away for future reference.
Currently I'm using Photo Mechanic to sort and rate, Thumbs Plus to index, and Bibble Pro for batch conversions. Individually they're all wonderful applications. (FPV looks to be as good for my purposes as Photo Mechanic, at 1/3 the price; I just discovered it today.)
Trouble is, Thumbs Plus and Bibble don't see the ratings applied by Photo Mechanic.
I was hoping that FPV might do better, and to a small degree it does -- Bibble can pick up the rating that FPV applies, which is a start. However, that leaves me with TWO XMP files; Bibble and FPV use different naming conventions (bibble leaves on the original file extension and adds .XMP after that; not that that's FPV's problem!).
None of these schemes yet let me go back and re-evaluate the initial ratings using the good rating program. One obvious hack is to move things around in various directories. Trouble is, this causes confusion (adjacent photos get different ratings, and this makes it hard to compare again later; and also, once files are recorded in the database, moving them loses the database information associated with them).
I'm looking for a workflow that doesn't consist of a series of hacks precariously piled on top of each other. And it's likely, since I just started playing with FPV today, that I'm not yet fully appreciating how to use it effectively. So, anybody think they understand what I'm looking for? Any suggestions?