Categoriz photos

[Till]

I have the following problem. I want to catalog my quite extensive photo collection. The photos are on an external hard drive and are already divided into different folders according to locations, trips and other topics. My concern now is on the one hand to change the picture names and on the other hand to assign the photos to different categories and quality levels and sometimes to comment on them.

I've already created around 30 new categories, and that worked well. Renaming is also not a problem. Then I categorized the photos in several folders, partly commented on them and classified them according to quality levels. The next day, however, I had to find out that the categorizations and ratings were only preserved in the last folder I worked on. The comments remain. Since I couldn't find a button for save anywhere, I had previously assumed that all entries would be saved automatically after exiting. What am I doing wrong?

[xnview]

categories are saved in database, do you have changed folder name outside?