Good morning! 🙂
Today it’s XMP time. Let’s move in time to XMP world…
As you probably know, XMP stands for Extensible Metadata Platform and it is a way of storing data like star ratings, keywords, develop settings etc.
What’s great about Xmp is that it is open source, which means anyone can contribute to the project and make it available.
When you work in Lightroom, any changes you make are written into the Catalog or can be written into the XMP. If you use Catalog instead of Xmp, the changes you make won’t be available when you open a raw image in Adobe Bridge as an example . If you want the information to be available to other applications, you need to write metadata to XMP.
Not everything gets stored in XMP. Here’s what is not stored in XMP:
- virtual copies
- image editing history
- stacks
- flags
This is caused by XMP specifications limitations.
What if I use Jpegs? – I get asked very often.
You won’t see sidecar XMP files next to your Jpegs or TIFFs. The XMP for these files is written into the header of the file and it doesn’t affect the file itself.
If you want to write changes into XMP manually inside Lightroom, select an image (or a whole bunch of images) and press Ctrl+S / Cmd+S or go to Metadata -> Write Metadata to Files.
I hope you enjoyed it, that’s it for today!
