From what I understand this is the way EM works. EM is image cataloging software - all of the metadata you store about images is stored within EM's own database. That catalog database is maintained independently of the images it references (and that is why you need to be maintaining a backup of your catalog in addition to your images). This seems natural. Whilst there are fields within say the JPEG file format for storing keywords, EM allows the user more metadata than is specified in a particular file format or IPTC metadata (for example EM catalog sets). This also makes for more efficient searching - for example searching a database of 10,000 images for 'family birthday' is always going to be quicker than scanning 10,000 image files for the same. So as far as I am aware then you are correct - updating EM keywords only updates the EM database, and not the referenced images, until such time as you synch the annotations back to the image files. To do otherwise would also have an impact on your backups. nb, each time you update keywording you only have to make a new backup of the catalog - as opposed ot 'deprecating' the backed version of the image and making a new backup of the image with the updated metadata.

regards
George.

I'm a big fan of Peter's DAM book and it's definitely helped me become more efficient in managing my work.

My blog is the Wedding Photographer Manchester blog.

George.

That is true. EM will not provide this on it's own - it's just one part of a bigger solution.

To achieve this level of integration you are going to need to use additional technologies.
An obvious approach, although very tekky, would be to build a dynamic top level page, or a dynamic index page.
This would read a list of galleries say from a MySQL database on your server each time the page was served up.

So you'd be looking at integrating MySQL, some server-side scripting, like PHP and an admin page that would make it easier for someone within the business to add new gallery data to the database.

This is actually what I used to provide on my site - a 'wedding gallery' page that dynamically listed each of the galleries present in a database. Each gallery is a separate (password protected) static HTML page generated using EM's gallery utility. Each time I generated a gallery and uploaded it to the website I'd 'add' the gallery (name and thumbnail image) to the database.

George.

Expression Media is at the core of my DAM.
The HTML Gallery generation is one of EM's really strong points for me. It is ultimately customisable and can be incorporated seamlessly into an existing website. Once you've got the template you need it's also dead easy to update and evolve it. EM has a powerful and flexible set of macros to expose the contents of your catalog and metadata in more ways than you likely would ever use.

For one example of how this can be applied have a look at this open wedding gallery.

George.