Today’s Question: As a follow up to editing photos when the source drive is not connected, how does Lightroom deal with it when write to XMP sidecar files is enabled? Does it wait until the drive is connected and write them then? Automatically?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, as soon as the source files are available again, Lightroom Classic will automatically save any updates you had made while the files were offline as long as you have turned on the option for these updates to be applied automatically.
More Detail: One of the advantages of the catalog in Lightroom Classic is that you can browse your photos (as long as previews had been built) and apply metadata updates even if the source files aren’t currently available. For example, if you store your photos on an external hard drive that isn’t connected to the computer, you can still review those photos, assign star ratings, add keywords, and more. If you build Smart Previews you can even apply adjustments in the Develop module.
If you turn on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog, Lightroom Classic will also save standard metadata updates to the source files. If you have applied updates while the source files were offline, Lightroom Classic will automatically start saving any metadata updates to the XMP sidecar files for raw captures (or to the files themselves for other image formats) once the files are available again.
If you’re not feeling confident that the updates were saved to the source files, or if you haven’t turned on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox, you can also manually save metadata updates to the source files. Simply go to the Library module and select the photos you want to update, then choose Metadata > Save Metadata to Files from the menu.
