On Mon, Jun 7, 2010 at 11:18 PM, Boris Liberman <[email protected]> wrote: > A quick question for those who use LR as their main work tool. Do you use > sidecar files or do you put the metadata into the picture files (.DNGs then > I presume)?
- Lightroom stores the metadata in the catalog file. It only writes it to disk as a .XMP sidecar file for native raw formats, or into DNG, PSD, TIFF and JPEG files, if you have the option to keep the metadata synchronized checked or manually select the "Metadata->Write metadata to files..." command. LR doesn't actually use either embedded or .XMP sidecar stored metadata except when importing files or when you tell it to read metadata from files. - Native raw files are proprietary formats and are considered read-only so LR outputs metadata for them as .XMP sidecars when the above options are elected. All other formats that LR supports allow the metadata to be safely appended into the original file. Personally, I see no need whatever to write metadata out to the file system independent of the Lightroom catalog UNLESS I need to be using Lightroom in conjunction with Bridge and other applications in the Adobe Creative Suite that can understand and use it. There's really no point to it ... my backup and archiving schema prevents data loss more than satisfactorily without this additional overhead. I do manually output metadata to files for specific purposes on occasion and when exporting completed work. I use the "Metadata Wrangler" to control what I put into my exported files. I also use DNG format for raw files, mostly because it allows a substantial disk space savings with most of the raw files I use. -- Godfrey godfreydigiorgi.posterous.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
