I have a few tiff files which will not accept keywords. Or rather, they lose their keywords at some point in processing. All my .dng files are given keywords, including the rogue few. Then I process them in Camera Raw, save them as tiffs, and work on/print them.
With the rogue files, if I tick a keyword in my keywords list, I get an error message saying "There was an error writing metadata" to the file.
Looking online, I've found that 'forbidden characters' can cause this: apostrophes, commas, hyphens in the metadata or the filename . But I have hundreds of files with these characters in the keywords, and the keywords are visible in all of them. Every one of my thousands of photo files has commas and hyphens in the filename: they are all of the form 'D 179-07, Dec 10, Bundi.tif'. Again, the keywords are visible in all but a very few -- 9 in my entire 'Final' folder and its subfolders.
If I look at the file properties in Explorer, and under Details, Tags, all the rogue files still have the keywords which I attached to them in the .dng state.
I removed the keywords in Explorer, and in 7 out of 9 cases I could re-apply them successfully in Bridge. In the other 2 cases, I also had to copy and paste the file contents into a new file 'Untitled-1.tif'; then apply the keywords to that; then rename it back to its original name. For some reason that worked.
So far I have only investigated 'Final' and its subfolders. I dread to think how many files are lurking without keywords in the folders/subfolders named 'Initial', 'Working' and 'Proofed'--and how long it will take to get them properly keyworded. I depend on keywords; I use them every day to find files.
Does anyone understand how this happens? Is there a less roundabout cure?
I am using Photoshop CS5 x54 and Bridge 4.5.11 under Windows 7. I run everything as an administrator, and all my photo files have the same permissions.
Best wishes
Mary