Today’s Question: I’m scanning old photos that have detail on the back. I’ve been entering everything into the Title and Caption fields in Lightroom Classic. Last night it dawned in me that unless a future generation has Lightroom, the details I’m adding to the Title and Caption fields will be lost. Is there a way to add these details into a file type so it doesn’t get lost?
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can absolutely preserve the updates to the Title and Caption fields (as well as other fields included in the various metadata standards) by saving the metadata to the source files in addition to the catalog, or by exporting copies of the photos with metadata included.
More Detail: By default, the metadata updates you apply in Lightroom Classic are only stored in the catalog, not the source images on the hard drive. That would create a potential challenge for others to be able to access the information you’ve added to metadata at a later date, unless they had access to and were familiar with Lightroom Classic. Fortunately there are a couple of things you can do to ensure the information is available.
First, you can enable the option to automatically write metadata updates to the source files. To do so, go to the menu and choose Edit > Catalog Settings on Windows or Lightroom Classic > Catalog Settings on Macintosh. Go to the Metadata tab and turn on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox. Note that this will only cause metadata fields in established standards, as well as Develop module settings, to be saved to the source images. For proprietary raw captures the information will be saved to an XMP “sidecar” file, and for other supported file formats the original file will be updated.
Another option is to export copies of photos in a more widely supported format with the metadata included. You can select the images you want to export copies of, and then click the Export button at the bottom of the left panel in the Library module to get started.
In the Export dialog, you can specify the location where you want to save the exported copies and choose among a variety of other settings. In this context I suggest exporting the images as JPEG files. In terms of the metadata, I suggest choosing the “All Metadata” option from the Include popup in the Metadata section. You can adjust the other settings based on how you want to create copies of the selected photos, and then click the Export button.
Once the metadata is included in the images, that information can be accessed through various software applications (including Adobe Bridge, which is free for anyone to use), or even by browsing the file info in the operating system using the Get Info command on Macintosh or the Properties command on Windows.
