Any suggestions on video and photo tag editors?

I have home videos and photos that come from multiple "artists" (family members). I'd like to be able to use active and smart playlists to offer quick filtering options (eg "Mom & Dad's Movies", "Johnny's Movies", etc). I can't find an easy way to edit the tag data in the files. Photos are almost entirely JPG. Movies are mostly MPG and MTS. Any suggestions on tools / utils that will let me edit tag fields in these files?

I just realized that Mezzmo will allow you to attempt to change the tag fields by right-clicking on a file or group of files and then selecting properties.

I say attempt because some of these updates appear to complete with no errors (eg ARTIST field in Mezzmo displays the updated value), but then when I trigger a "Maintain Playlist" the update disappears (eg ARTIST field in Mezzmo then displays blank or previous field)?

Any ideas why some of the updates aren't sticking?

When you do Maintain Library - do you have "Update All" selected or "Update Missing Information"? Also, changes done within Mezzmo are only Mezzmo-specific, so they are not written back to the file (they're only stored in Mezzmo's database).

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Originally Posted by Dennis

When you do Maintain Library - do you have "Update All" selected or "Update Missing Information"?

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Update All is checked

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Also, changes done within Mezzmo are only Mezzmo-specific, so they are not written back to the file (they're only stored in Mezzmo's database).

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So what happens if/when tag information in the file is updated outside of Mezzmo (like through Windows)? Is the info in the Mezzmo database discarded?

If "Update All" is checked, then it will do exactly that - replace all information in Mezzmo's database from file again, but since the information you've modified isn't written back to the file, it cannot be read in again. I recommend changing this to "Update Missing" to keep your changes intact.

If file information is updated from outside Mezzmo and there's already a record for that field in the database (e.g. the "artist" is already non-empty), then it will not be updated using the "Update Missing", but will be updated/replaced using "Update All".

Thanks Dennis. I'd prefer to have as much of the tagging / classification information in the file so that it is available to other applications (not just Mezzmo). So, in the short term, I'll do as much as I can with external tag editors and then finish & fine tune with Mezzmo with "Update Missing" setting.

Along these lines I have two questions:
- is there any reason why Mezzmo couldn't add the option to update tags in the file where the tag is already defined (like EXIF tags in JPG files)?
- how does Mezzmo derive the YEAR value? I'm assuming that it comes from one of the standard date fields (created, modified, accessed) but can't see a consistent pattern.

We may add tag editing ability in a future version, but this is more of a long-term plan, rather than a short-term one.

The "year" value is derived differently for different types of files - for photo/music we try to read it from embedded tags, for video (some video types) we also try to read the tags and we also look if there's an XML description file present or not, for files that we canot read or that do not have such a tag, we'll use the system's year value (such as the creation date).

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Originally Posted by Dennis

We may add tag editing ability in a future version, but this is more of a long-term plan, rather than a short-term one.

The "year" value is derived differently for different types of files - for photo/music we try to read it from embedded tags, for video (some video types) we also try to read the tags and we also look if there's an XML description file present or not, for files that we canot read or that do not have such a tag, we'll use the system's year value (such as the creation date).

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Let me just say this Year tag method is not working very good. It would be nice to be able to edit the tags in the file, if that every does become a feature that would be great.

But it would be much easier to make an option to get database tags from the filename. Like in many other media programs where you tell it the layout like <title> - <year> and then Mezzmo gets the database info from the selected file and fills in the database for those items.

I have made a few smart playlists for Year 2012 and 2011 but it don't work correctly, it seems many files have those years per the database because of the way mezzmo get the year data for those videos. I have tagged many of these files with Mediamonkey and they have the year set but Mezzmo still gets the year for the file date and not the tag.

Just saw this post. One program that may do what you want is winamp. http://www.winamp.com/

I don't know about the jpgs but it can and does allow editing the info for audio and video files. You can use the free version to do so. Some files will probably require you to dl a codec to use that file.

Hi Rainey,
we have tested getting the year from an mp3, where the year has been set with MediaMonkey, the year is correctly set by Mezzmo using our test file. Could you please send us a file where the year is not being correctly set by Mezzmo so that we can try to reproduce the problem, send the file to support [at] conceiva [dot] com with a short description of the year that Mezzmo is getting from the file and the year that it should be getting.