Here's an answer I've received from them after making direct contact. Best not to wait for answers here in this Forum, but contact them directly.
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To populate the value from XMP/EXIF metadata to user fields, you need to do two things:
1. In ThumbsPlus 8 SP1 go to Options > Preferences, click the Metadata tab and enable the "Automatically populate user fields from image metadata" option. Click OK to save the preferences.
2. Go to Database > User Fields. Here create a text type field for each XMP/EXIF information you want to have stored in user fields. For example, to have the orientation value stored, enter "Orientation" (without the quotes) for Field Label, select "Text" for Field Type, enter 12 for Field Length and click the Add button. You will have to find the correct length for each type of data, in order to have enough chars to store any possible value for that XMP/EXIF information, and not making it too long to waste space in the database. Once you have added all the user fields, click OK.
Now, ThumbsPlus 8 will automatically populate the values from the metadata to the user fields for every new thumbnail created. If you want to make this for already thumbnailed files, you will have to re-create the thumbnails. Go to Edit > Find. Here click the "Clear All" button, select "Local drives only" for "Restrict search to" and click OK. This will find all your images already thumbnailed which are stored in any local disk. Now go to Edit > Select All and then go to Thumbnail > Make Selected.
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