Simplify Entry of Common Metadata in Lightroom 2
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Update: A newer version of this plugin is now available. |
According to Scott Kelby
I keep my metadata up-to-date on all my rated photos for two main reasons:
- So I can find them later; and
- To help me grow as a photographer by allowing me to better understand what an image captures and how.
Applying keywords, IPTC location information and geoencoding (when appropriate) helps me to find my photos later. Gaining insights into my photography depends more upon captions, ratings, labels and EXIF data. My quandary was Lightroom 2 addresses these goals using two separate Library Metadata panel layouts: Location and Default.
Constantly changing backwards and forwards between these two tagsets (i.e. Metadata panel layouts), or scrolling around the massive All tagset, unnecessarily slows down my workflow. Fortunately this was a simple issue to resolve as the Lightroom 2 SDK provides a way to define new tagsets. The result is my newest plugin which provides two additional tagsets for use in the Library module.
| Default (With Location) | Extends the standard ‘Default‘ tagset with additional IPTC location fields |
| LR: All | A copy of the standard ‘All’ tagset, to demonstrate available fields. |
The second tagset was added because I found the SDK documentation for tagset development to be insufficient and (in places) inaccurate. The LR: All tagset implements most of the fields available in the Metadata panel, so if you are interested in modifying my plugin to better suit your individual workflow you have a working example of most of the fields you can select from.
Installation
- Download the plugin: Latest Metadata Tagsets zip
- Copy the file where you want the plugin to permanently reside, then unzip the file. This should create a sub-directory called metadata-tagsets.lrplugin.
- Open Lightroom 2, then select the File\Plugin Manager menu option.
- Press the Add button, select the metadata-tagsets.lrplugin directory created in step 2, then press OK.
- The plugin is now installed and enabled. Press Done.
Usage
When you open the Library module and display the right panel, a Metadata section is shown towards the bottom of the panel. To use the new features:
- Select the drop down list showing available tagsets.
- Choose one of the new tagsets listed at the bottom of the list. For example, the Default (with Location) tagset depicted here.
I hope you find this plugin useful and feel free to share your experiences or suggestions in the comments section below.
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In: Howto, Project, Software · Tagged with: code, lightroom, lr2, metadata, plugin, workflow
Hey Matt, would you drop me a line on my Adobe e-mail account? I’d like to hear what problems you encountered with the documentation so we can try to address those next time around.
Thanks!
Eric, I’ll drop you a line with some feedback about the documentation. Thanks for your interest in improving this!
UPDATE: Feedback sent. Please let me know if you haven’t received it yet.
Nice plug-in! Do you have a directory of any non-Adobe metadata tags, such as those from Jeffery Friedl, to use as a reference for adding other metadata to a tagset?
Hi Bob,
I don’t have a directory of Jeffrey’s tagset fields yet but a good starting point would be including all of the fields from an individual plugin. You can usually do this by placing a “.*” at the end of the plugin’s identifier. e.g. I would include an entry for “info.regex.lightroom.export.facebook2.*” to display all of Jeffrey’s Facebook plugin custom metadata.
To work out the unique ID for each plugin the only sure fire way I know of is to open the preferences file and browse for it. To find your preferences file, while in Lightroom open up the Edit/Preferences menu option, click on the “Show Lightroom Presets Folder…” button, then navigate to the Lightroom/Preferences subdirectory once Explorer/Finder appears. This directory should contain a Lightroom 2 Preferences.agprefs file. Open that up in a text file editor and search for the string ‘[“sdk_’ (without the single quotes). This will show you the opening line for each plugin’s preferences, and each line that starts with ‘[“sdk_info.regex’ (again, without the single quotes) is a Jeffrey Friedl plugin. The text after the ‘[“sdk_’ (… you get he picture) is the unique identifier for the plugin and all metadata entries implemented by the plugin should use this prefix.
Hope that helps you find the information you are looking for.
Jeffery was kind enough to reply to a direct email. The references are:
info.regex.lightroom.export.flickr2.url
info.regex.lightroom.export.flickr2.uploaded
and
info.regex.lightroom.export.facebook2.url
info.regex.lightroom.export.facebook2.uploaded
I tried the .uploaded tags and they worked fine.
Bob, thanks for passing them on. I’m planning to release an update to this plugin later today and it will include a tagset with all known third party metadata tokens. These have now been added to that list.
[...] Metadata Tagset plugin for Lightroom 2 has been updated. The new version contains additional tagsets to help [...]
Thanks kindly for a needed addition to the metadata entry panel. However, when I have more than one image selected and enter info in the new locations fields, only the first image retains the info. What’s going on there?
@Andy, I’ve seen situations when it appears the photo metadata was not retained. In these cases if I selected just one photo then arrowed through the others that were already selected they actually did have the metadata applied (it just didn’t look that way.
Other alternative is you were in loupe view when updating the metadata. The metadata panel is only available in grid view and changes in Library module only affect multiple photos when in grid view, not loupe view.