Finding cropped Canon images in IMatch

The problem

My Canon R50 lets met crop photos in camera. After watching video The Composition Secret Hiding in Your Camera Settings where he describes using in-camera cropping to help with composition, I did some testing.

And it works perfectly well—in the camera. Outside of the camera life is a little different.

My workflow is:

flowchart LR
a["Take photo (Canon RAW)"] --> b[DXO Pure Raw] 
b --> c[IMatch]

class b internal-link
class c internal-link

Neither DXO Pure Raw, nor IMatch recognised the camera’s internal cropping flags. Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional reads the flags but why would I add that to my workflow as a step that I can’t actually do anything with is beyond me.

Three solutions

Hint: Only attempt 3 is viable.

Attempt 3: Visual proxies

If I shoot a 1:1 CRW and generate a JPEG at the same time, the JPEG is also 1:1 format. Since the JPEG is a version of the CRW, and the IMatch relations function lets me specify a version as a visual proxy, the CRW file displays as a 1:1 thumbnail. In other words, the thumbnail is a link to the CRW file, but the thumbnail image displayed is that of the JPEG.

It’s blindingly fast and provides the image cue I want.

Attempt 2: Identify crops using filters

Pretty simple. Create a filter with a Metadata Search on Cropped Image Left equal to 1000 and I have my 1:1 photos. Adjust for 4:3 and 16:9 using the figures given in Attempt 1 Identify crops using categories.

It’s fast, but requires me to have some idea there are cropped images in the current view in order to apply the filter to identify them.

Attempt 1: Identify crops using categories

WARNING

Don’t do this unless you want IMatch to grind to a halt as it recalculates the additional categories after each every single change you make.

I tried setting the xmp:crs crop related metadata within IMatch to little success. I could save everything, but IMatch would not generate a thumbnail based on the information given. So, here is my temporary work around.

1. Use the IMatch Tag Manager to add the Canon AspectInfo tags to the list read from the file into the database when a photo is added.
2. Create an IMatch Metadata Panel called Canon Crop to display the aspect info information read in.
3. Create a set of three formula categories to read the values from the camera (see table below)
4. Colour code those categories to highlight images where an in-camera crop has been applied.

Images out of the camera are 6000x4000 pixels.

Ratio	Formula
1:1 Crop	"@Variable[{File.MD.Canon::AspectInfo\3\CroppedImageLeft\0|cast:int},between,1000,1000]"
16:9 Crop	"@Variable[{File.MD.Canon::AspectInfo\4\CroppedImageTop\0|cast:int},between,316,316]"
4:3 Crop	"@Variable[{File.MD.Canon::AspectInfo\3\CroppedImageLeft\0|cast:int},between,336,336]"