Today’s Question: I’m getting ready to import a lot of older images into Lightroom Classic These aren’t high-resolution images, so I want to use Topaz’ product to up-size them. At some point, I’m going to want to add keywords as I love this aspect of Lightroom Classic to help me find images. If I import these original images and assign keywords and then up-size them, will the keywords carry over to the new, higher resolution images?
Tim’s Quick Answer: When you create a derivative copy of an image in Lightroom Classic, the new copy will inherit the metadata from the original. Therefore, if you keyword the images before editing them with a plug-in such as Gigapixel by Topaz Labs (https://topazlabs.com/ref/273/) the image created in that process will include the keywords you had applied to the original image.
More Detail: When you create a derivative image in Lightroom Classic using either the Photo > Edit In or File > Export with Preset commands, the new derivative image will inherit the standard metadata from the original image. Therefore, if you assign keywords to an original image and then create a derivative copy, the keywords from the original will be included in the metadata for the derivative copy, for example.
It is important to keep in mind, however, that once you create a derivative image that inherits the metadata from the original, from that point forward the two images will be separate. That means that any updates you apply to metadata for one image after the derivative is created will not apply to the other image.
I therefore recommend applying all applicable keywords and metadata updates to the original image before creating a derivative copy, so that the original and the derivative will have as much metadata in common as possible. If you want to apply metadata updates to one of the images later in your workflow, you might want to synchronize those updates to keep the metadata as close to a perfect match between the two (or more) images as possible.
