Any suggestions on video and photo tag editors?

[hartlenb]

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?

[hartlenb]

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?

[Paul]

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).

[hartlenb]

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

Update All is checked

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).

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?

[Paul]

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".

[hartlenb]

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.