P: Log file of changes made (for privacy protection laws)

Great story, Markus. Thanks.

I'm already in direct contact with the GDPR officials in my country, who I expect not to know anything about it, but will hopefully forward me to someone who does.

Gary - again I explain: this has been directly deducted from the requirements for processing surveillace video. Allegedly, these regulations apply to photographers as well. The councelling event was held by the chamber of commerce. The one I visited before too, and there we were told, that in Austria there were merely 2 experts for GDPR in total, one of them was speaking.

Rob - it's all no crime, but due to someone not thinking things through, any kind of manipulation must be logged - you wouldn't want anyone to tamper with a surveillance video, and as photographers seem to be the same as CCTV, they get the same set of rules 😛

I figured, and the person at the first meeting verified my thoughts, that the EU quickly fleshed out these regulations after they - finally - realized (how long did that take? A decade, or two?) that the US were skimming our data without any hassle, making big business with it, and since the EU wants that data business for themselves, they now, all of a sudden, "care about EU citicen's privacy", who hardly anybody seems to give a damn about, anyway, and never did before.

So now, within the limits of sounding butthurt, I have to spend days encrypting data, moving data, typing sheets and lists of data, hassling clients with E-Mail encryption just to send them a bill, encrypting cloud files, all my client work etc, with no data whatsoever anyone might be interested in stealing, because it's - mostly - to be found online, anyway.

Of course they tried to sell it as "chance to work truly professionally", but seriously, primitive E-Mail decryption seems to be too much for MOST clients, so I'd rather use snail mail again. What a progress.

As an interested bystander (in Canada) I would also enjoy being educated on this. It seems impossible that anyone would want a detailed list of exactly what color changes each pixel went through from the RAW sensor data towards the final printed paper image. Even recording general tonal changes seems impractical for a court of law. Raising shadow detail is not a crime. I might expect a commercial photographer to record which features were falsified in the image, what was purposely changed by push or patch, but having everybody log every filter and tonal change seems the opposite of useful.

Again I ask - what part of the GDPR have you been told necessitates you to do this? I cannot find any reference across 10s of professional & amateur sites, blogs etc. for any kind of requirement like this, nor can I see any part of the GDPR that would seem to require it.  I think you may have been misled, so I suggest following up with the chamber of commerce or one of the presenters to get the article numbers in question and follow up on this in that way.

This doesn't resolve the issue of a missing log file with every single step taken - except if catalogue does keep a log.

I'll try to find an official contact in this matter, as it seems that people are more interested in a workararound around a clear, but not-so-clear matter.

One thing you can do to visually see what is different between the original file and the edited file is to put the original file on one layer and the edited file on another and choose "Difference" for the blend mode (in Photoshop). Things that are untouched are black, that are different aren't black.

Honestly, I cannot think of any article or recital in the GDPR that can require such records to be kept. Can you find out what articles of the GDPR your chamber of commerce believe are involved?

If the LR catalog does it, I'd say that's good enough. I'll find what exactly is being recorded. Photoshop's Log also just gives you the history states, which do vaguely reproduce what technically was done to the image, but of course not visually. We'll see how this resolves, but for now I think this needs to suffice.

There is, but in my version it says "Comments are not supported here" (translated from German). A standard CR2 file.