7 Comments

  1. I’ve been going back through some of these posts and this is something I never knew about. Lightroom has caused issues with crashing and stalling in the past (maybe because I’m running it on an ancient iMac), and there’s nothing worse than that initial panic when it freezes up! Weird that such an important setting is turned off by default.

    I assume that if you want to send a photo to someone, you can just send both the RAW file and the XMP sidecar—if they open the RAW, will it automatically open both of them?

    Another good option is to use a DNG. You need to remember to regularly update the metadata, but it saves all that XMP info directly within the file rather than in a sidecar. Pretty nifty if you want to keep everything in one package!

    • I don’t think so. But I may be wrong. I don’t use Apple Photos so I don’t know if it can… Google Photos sure can’t do that. However, if you export as a .DNG and then import it to them I think it should work.

  2. Prior to this setting being turned on, the metadata has not been being saved then, so do I need to go back into each catalog to select all of the files and tell it to save manually?
    And if the file is just a jpeg the metadata gets saved within the same jpeg file?

    • No. It will automatically start saving .xmp files for each file, but they keep saving as you keep the program open, so you may get a notice from LR as you try to exit the program that it will continue saving .xmp sidecar files when you start it again…

      I’m not actually sure what happens with JPG files. I never use them. Will edit the article appropriately when I get the chance.

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