Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Step Five:
Now, at the bottom of the General tab,
click the Go to Catalog Settings button
(also found under the Lightroom [PC: Edit]
menu). In the Catalog Settings dialog,
click on the Metadata tab. Here you can
determine whether you want to take the
metadata you add to your RAW photos
(copyright, keywords, etc.) and have it
written to a totally separate file, so
then for each photo you'll have two files—
one that contains the photo itself and a
separate file (called an XMP sidecar) that
contains that photo's metadata. You do
this by turning on the Automatically Write
Changes into XMP checkbox, but why
would you ever want to do this? Well,
normally Lightroom keeps track of all this
metadata you add in its database file—it
doesn't actually embed the info until your
photo leaves Lightroom (by exporting a
copy over to Photoshop, or exporting the
file as a JPEG, TIFF, or PSD—all of which
support having this metadata embedded
right into the photo itself). However, some
programs can't read embedded metadata,
so they need a separate XMP sidecar file.
Step Six:
Now that I've shown you that Automatic-
ally Write Changes into XMP checkbox,
I don't actually recommend you turn it on,
because writing all those XMP sidecars
takes time, which slows Lightroom down.
Instead, if you want to send a file to
a friend or client and you want the
metadata written to an XMP sidecar
file, first go to the Library module and
click on an image to select it, then press
Command-S (PC: Ctrl-S)
, which is the
shortcut for
Save Metadata to File
(which is found under the Metadata
menu). This writes any existing metadata
to a separate XMP file (so you'll need
to send both the photo and the XMP
sidecar together).
