LIBRARY - Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3: Streamlining Your Digital Photography Process - page 114

What's the correct version?
Whenever you're changing i le metadata it's important to understand exactly
what version is correct before proceeding. Other sot ware can change your image
i le metadata even if you don't actually open the i le using that sot ware. Bridge is
one such application; building previews for image i les in Bridge ot en will alter
i le metadata, resulting in a conl ict with Lightroom. If you know the metadata in
Lightroom is the most current, save it out to the i le. Otherwise, check the i les in
question to i gure out when and how the metadata was changed before reading
metadata into Lightroom. Of course, if you only use Lightroom for processing
your photos, you won't need to worry about this.

3

⌘ +S or Ctrl+S
Save metadata
to i le

Saving Metadata to Files
To save all the current Lightroom metadata out to the image i les on disk, use
the Save Metadata to File command. h is writes all the Lightroom metadata,
including Develop settings and keywords, to the i les. If your i les are dng, tif ,
psd or jpg, the metadata is written directly into the image i les. Native camera
raw images use xmp sidecar i les to store the metadata.

Saving your work is as important in Lightroom as in other sot ware applications,
but it's all too easy to work on and on without Lightroom prompting you to save.
h ough all your changes are automatically saved into the database, they are only
in the database until you save the changes out to the i les and/or export new i les.
So save ot en!

Don't use Automatic Save
Catalog Settings provides an option to automatically save your metadata to the
i les as you work. I generally don't recommend this, for several reasons. First,
many computers will experience a decrease in performance with this option
enabled. Second, even on a fast machine, I don't want Lightroom accessing my
i les that frequently. Lightroom will save out the metadata at er every change
made to any setting. h at much i le access increases the possibility of i le
corruption. h ird, and maybe more importantly, if Lightroom is always saving
out metadata as you work, you won't be able to use the Read Metadata from File
command to go back to a previous version.

Usually it's best to just regularly save out the metadata yourself (though one
exception might be when managing photos in workgroup environments.) To see
whether Lightroom is automatically saving metadata, check the option in the
Catalog Settings ➔ Metadata tab.