I am proposing that the REJECT rating (-1) should be exempted from propagating.
This avoids that one rejects and then unintended deletes files.
A separate option to propagate REJECT or not would satisfy all.
Reject is a fully valid XMP rating. IMatch uses it to allow you to quickly tag files for deletion. Adding yet another option to not propagate a reject rating would add yet another level of complexity in both the user interface and the internal coding. I don't know how many user see this as a problem. Lets see how many votes this gets in a week.
Wouldn't worry me either way, but it does seem to be an odd request. It's a bit like someone asking for the label Red not to propagate.
This sort of requirement is why I kept my propagation script (https://www.photools.com/community/index.php?topic=3086.0) alive - to deal with requirements that are hard to accommodate with native file relations propagation. You could modify the script to add a test for a reject rating and deal with it - i.e. preserve the ratings of versions where the master has a reject rating.
When you have buddy files and you delete one member you expect the other to be deleted.
When you use reject (rather than direct file delete) on a master file it behaves as if all versions are buddies -> they also get the reject rating.
I do not use buddy files ( Raw/developed) since I want to be able to delete a master w/o deleting a version
and vice versa. Using REJECT on a master (with propagation of ratings turned on) forces me to check all the versions and
remove the reject rating before I delete all files with REJECT set.
FERDINAND: I agree with you: there are many propagation issues which can not be handled with the current setup.
I too have some scripts which deal with such situations. I can write a script for deleting files with reject rating which would filter
out (or warn me about) versions which are also set as REJECT.
IMHO, the REJECT flag, though technically just a rating like any other, does have a special function, because it implies a special action (normally a delete), unlike any other rating.
Therefore, and although I do not use any propagations myself (for this and other reasons), I can understand the requester's arguments and I'd give it a
+1