Getting Started Right: Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3′s Critical Preference Menus
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3
Skip these buttons at your own risk! Adobe Photoshop Lightroom assumes that you know what you are doing from the moment that you import your very first file. This is professional grade software. These software engineers respect your intelligence. They assume that you bring a lot of background knowledge to the table from the moment that you first start up this program. They assume that you already know what proper photo storage is and how to backup all of your precious digital files.
Before you step up to bat you need to know what the Lightroom Catalog is and exactly where it lives inside of your computer. You need to know the name of your Catalog file and you need to know what information it stores. This the most intellectually challenging part of the whole new digital workflow. You also need to know:
- Why the “Automatically write changes into XMP” is such a great switch for beginning Lightroom users to activate?
- What the “store presets with catalog” preference switch does and how it could simplify your life?
- Why Lightroom is worried about your use of “illegal characters” in your file’s name?
None of these switches sound like a big deal until something bad happens. If you skip the critical “write changes into XMP” switch; if you never find Lightroom’s other hidden save buttons, and if your Lightroom Catalog file ever gets corrupted, do you know that you could lose all of your work? Years of effort in Lightroom could vanish in an instant. Are you keenly aware that if things go haywire, and that if you haven’t planned for a disaster, that every repair, that every keyword, and that every star rating would be gone?
Lightroom’s Super Important Automatically Write to XMP Preference Switch from David Marx on Vimeo.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Preference Menus from David Marx on Vimeo.
Once you have all your switches set, I suggest checking out this tutorial on how to build a Metadata Preset so that Lightroom can automatically add your copyright information into each and every photo that it ever references!
Filed Under: Getting Started • Workflow
About the Author: David Marx has an extensive knowledge of digital photography and is an Adobe Certified Expert in Photoshop and in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David is a talented instructor and his entertaining teaching style works for students of all skill levels. He has been teaching digital photography and image enhancement with Adobe Photoshop since 2002. In addition, David’s sports and landscape images are often featured on the web and in outdoor sports publications.
In 2009, David Marx led digital photography programs for the 
Wow, I really think this is going to scare people unnecessarily. Parts of the approach you’re taking with the “automatically write changes…” option are really a functions of proper catalog backups. Lightroom (at least in version 2 and earlier) does not write all changes in XMP files. Virtual copies, collections, and several other things in the catalog are not written to XMP thus writing changes to XMP is not a complete backup of all your settings. I agree with some of what you’re saying but you should really stress that users should *always* have proper backups of the catalogs themselves. That is more complete and I would argue more important that using the above mentioned setting as a backup method. Yes there are other benefits to the setting as you mentioned, but from a backup perspective catalog backups are more complete. That does lead into a whole other topic on catalog backup procedures though…
I agree that this will scare people unnecessarily, although I think your advice isn’t bad for beginners who don’t understand how Lightroom’s catalog works. But for what it’s worth, here’s the argument against enabling “Automatically write changes…”
When you aren’t writing changes to your images, you only need to backup your image files one time. I don’t mean you only need one copy; you should have multiple copies, including off-site, but you only need to do it once. Of course you still need to keep your backup archives up to date, adding your new photos as you create them, but once you’ve got your images backed up, those individual files won’t change. So you won’t have to make another backup of an image file every time you change it, and worry about which backup is the most recent one with all your most recent changes.
When you keep all your work in the catalog, you can go back and rework on old images without changing anything but the catalog file. And as long as you frequently backup the catalog (multiple backup copies, one off-site), you can always restore your work in the event of catastrophic loss. You simply restore all those image files you backed up when you initially imported them, and you restore the catalog that you backed up continuously. Voilà, you’re back in business.
Also, if your backup method includes Time Machine, or a similar program that uses versioning, it can fill up your backup drives very quickly with multiple copies of images where all you’ve changed is the metadata. By keeping all your work in the catalog, you don’t create multiple versions of your images when you re-work them, so you get more out of your backup hard drives.
The caveat to this method is that if you need to make a copy of the file for a client, you need to remember to always export the file from Lightroom so metadata will be applied, instead of just finding the file with Finder and copying it from there. But that’s not a bad habit to be in.
Dear DigitalOxygen, David, and all of the others who will soon object to my XMP advice,
You are absolutely right. I am taking a scare tactic here. If it gets a beginner Lightroom user interested in their preference menus then perhaps it is an effective teaching technique.
I think that all of the points you raise are right but I am sure that none of you are new to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. When you were learning to ride a bicycle did you use training wheels? I have never said that advanced users should always keep this switch turned on and I will readily admit that I often turn it off.
But you and I are bringing a ton of experience and background knowledge to the table here. My job as an educator is to ease the learning curve. I am on my way to the classroom right now to teach aspiring professionals for the Rocky Mountain School of Photography. Teaching Lightroom beginners is what I do for a living and my experience has convinced me that beginners need the extra help.
Setting the software so that your work is automatically saved down to the file level is a huge plus when you are learning. With this switch active, the work that you do in Lightroom is immediately visible if you look at the same files using the Adobe Bridge. Likewise, since the metadata has been pressed down to the file level you can move you can your files around the computer or from computer to computer, or build a whole new catalog, without loosing your work. [Yes, you would loose your Flags, Virtual Copies, Copy Names, and Collections since these features are stored only at the Catalog Level but your image’s metadata and your develop settings would survive.]
Again, I think that you are doing other readers a great service and giving out great advice but I have to ask how did come to this knowledge? You certainly didn’t learn it from George Jardine’s “Five Rules”– the initial Lightroom tutorial screen. You didn’t learn it from within the software since there is basically no internal help documentation I doubt that you learned it from either of these articles on the Adobe Community Help Site either:
About metadata and XMP from Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 Community Help
Work with Camera Raw and Lightroom
I suspect that you acquired your excellent and sophisticated understanding of the Lightroom Catalog / the XMP switch through years of experience and probably a couple of Catalog disasters. If I can ease that learning curve then I have done a good job for my students.
Once you have this level of sophisticated knowledge about the Catalog, about the variety of ways to save your work within the software, about the complexities of different backup systems, and of how to restore from a corrupted .lrcat file, then by all means please turn this switch off! But if Lightroom is brand new to you then I suggest starting your learning process with it active.
For more on this topic in general see Making Sense of Metadata Settings in Lightroom.
David
There is one issue that needs to be mentioned and that is that LR will save to XMP immediately upon a change. Most applications, when set to “auto save” will save every few minutes, not the instant you change your document (or image in the case of LR).
Why does this matter? Because it can have a drastic impact on performance! Consider, as an example, a user trying to find a good white balance. Typically this is done by moving the slider back and forth, trying to find a good WB. The problem is that every time the user lets go of the slider, LR will save to file. The same goes for all sliders, buttons, switches, etc..
If your hardware is fast enough, it will hardly affect you. For a lot of people it will, and it is a fair guess that this is why the checkbox is off by default. I know of several people who enabled the option and later complained that LR was too slow.
The concept of saving changes to a document/image has been around forever. Surely it can’t be that hard to teach or understand, right? Ctrl-S and you’re done
I admit that your advice is good for beginners who don’t understand yet how the catalog works and are still learning Lightroom basics. When I was starting with Lightroom, it confused me why my changes weren’t reflected outside of LR. So I understand why you make the recommendation, but I wanted to offer a counterpoint. Sorry if I came across as overly critical.
And, to answer your question about how I came to this knowledge, I have to give credit to Peter Krogh. His book on asset management has been an invaluable resource for me. http://www.thedambook.com/
David, and others,
I’ve been writing all changes to XMP files during all of my time with Lightroom. For me, that extra layer of security is worth a little bit of performance. When my performance is significantly effected, I have upgraded hardware.
I will admit that I am a little anal about backing up all of my work in multiple places, and thought that I was always covered wherever I was. However, I was away from my office for several weeks last winter and my Lightroom catalog got corrupted. No problem, I had been backing up most every day on the road. However, when I loaded my backup catalog I found that it was also corrupted. A bit of panic set in. I had been on the road for almost 5 weeks, and had put many hours into working on a couple of thousand images.
I was able to have a friend send me my latest backup from my home office that day. I loaded it onto my laptop and re-imported all of my photos from the previous 5 weeks, and like magic, all of my work was there….thanks to the XMP files.
So while I feel that it’s pretty easy to just hit Ctrl-S, I’m really sold on one more layer of protection for saving my work.
Thanks for all of your work and help with my Lightroom experience.
David,
When I import my files from a CF card, I always “Copy photos as Digital Negative (DNG) and add to catalog.” Since I do that, is it still necessary to check the box to “Automatically write changes to XMP”? (I always thought that the DNG files contained everything with the photos making this auto write changes to XMP feature unneeded.)
If it is still necessary to have it checked, is there a way to make corrections for all of the photos I already imported and developed without this feature being checked?
Thank you in advance!
I also am questioning if I need to check to box to Automatically write changes to XMP if I am using the DNG format.
Merrill
Dear David and Merrill,
You are asking an excellent question and one that is created by Adobe’s ambiguous use of the word “XMP.” You are absolutely right that by re-wrapping your digital camera raw files in the DNG file format that you do not need a separate .XMP sidecar file.
In this case though, Adobe is using the word XMP to represent the Metadata block for any type of file. If you don’t turn this switch on, or figure out the other ways to save your work down to the file level, then your DNG files lack critical metadata like your copyright, your contact info, your keywords, and your develop settings.
You may have added this data within Lightroom but until this switch is turned on, or you find one of the other save metadata buttons, nothing has been written down to the file level. Until you use this switch, or hit save elsewhere, your work exists only at the Lightroom Catalog level for all of your files including your DNG’s.
If you have not turned on this switch, or found one of the other save buttons, try this experiment:
Add your Copyright info to a .jpg, .tif, or .dgn file using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
Quit Lightroom and find this file on your hard drive.
Copy this file to your desktop and slightly change its name. Add the word test, or a number, to end of its file name but be sure to keep its extension.
Restart Lightroom and import this file with your Metadata Preset rubber stamp (the Metadata to Apply After Import Switch) turned off.
Now look at the new file’s metadata. See how it’s all missing?
If you try this experiment you will see that your Copyright field is blank because the information that you added to the original image was never recorded down to the file level. The XMP data block is where this information would have been recorded. For proprietary raw files this data block is an external file. For all other formats including DNG this data block is inside the file itself.
Turning this switch on will start saving your work down to the file’s XMP block level even for work that you did weeks ago in Lightroom. The other easy way to save all of your old work down is to right click on your folder names and select the “Save Metadata” button.
I hope this helps clear up some of the confusion over this ambiguous term.
–
David Marx
Great stuff. I am in the process of “correcting” my set up and have a question. Is there an easy way to convert my file structure from unstructured to date based….2020..June 15 etc.? Thanks and keep up the great content.
Dear John Hayes,
There is an easy way but you won’t like it. The easiest way is to build a new Lightroom catalog and then import all your files over again. On the second go round you could pick one of the other folder naming systems. (I like the Year-Month-Day all in numbers with dashes best.)
Warning: Before you take this advice think about all the work that you will have to do over. All your pick flags, virtual copies, collections, and preferences will be gone.
DOUBLE WARNING: You had better save all your work down to the file level before you try this procedure or you could lose everything!
Rather than all this hassle I would suggest picking a new system moving forward and not worrying about the old folder names. Just let them be….
David
Dear David,
Now that I´ve watched your first videos, I´ve realised that it would have been a better idea if I had used an external drive in which to place all my photos and my Lr catalogue. Now my question is: Can I create a new catalogue in an external drive from scratch (as you showed in your video) and then import/append…my old catalogue into the new one without loosing any work?
Thanks in advance.
Inaki,
I’m sure David will jump in with his own answer, but I’ll say that there’s no need to create a new catalog. You can just move the existing catalog to the new preferred storage location.
Refer to the article How to get your Lightroom Catalog onto an External Hard Drive for more information on moving your catalog to a new location.
-Scott
Dear Inaki,
As Scott pointed out you could just move your existing catalog over to an external disk. Be sure to move the whole folder though. Those preview files, and the other sub-folders, are important. Don’t forget though that the catalog is separate from your actual images and that we want both on our external drive. See My Photo Storage System: Two External Hard Drives for more details.
–
David Marx
Thanks very much, Scott and David for your advice. I´ll try that as soon as I get my new external HDD. Thanks again!
In some of your videos you talk about how you don’t like pick/reject flag system in Lightroom. I also sort of find the implementation of the flag thing annoying, though hard to replace by other means. I would love to see a video or something on how you suggest one should approach picking out one’s favorite images and cleaning out the useless ones.
If you set Auto Write to XMP to ‘on’ and don’t use DNG files then only the xmp files get backed up each time they change. This saves a lot of time and space for those using apps like Time Machine.
bkhl,
I’m sure David has a different way of going about it, but here’s my method of editing down a shoot using the Pick and Reject flags:
Using Pick and Reject Flags in Lightroom
-Scott
Nik,
You’re correct about only .xmp “sidecar” files being changed when not using DNG. That, in itself, does not overcome the benefits of DNG for me, however. The smaller file size, lack of separate metadata files, and cross-compatibility make DNG my preferred file format.
That choice isn’t for everyone, though. David talks a bit about his choice to use DNG in the article Converting Digital Camera Raw Files to the Dng Format using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
-Scott
Dear Nik,
Sorry about the delay and many thanks to Scott for his insightful comments. I have two complaints about the Pick / Reject flags.
1. These markings are stored at the catalog level only. They are never passed down to the file level. This is great since it keeps your markings private but it is a disaster if your catalog file gets corrupted. Obviously, if you have a rock solid catalog and file backup strategy then this problem is minimal but in my experience most people do not have three copies of every file (including the catalog) stored on two different types of media with one version offsite. See for more on backups and archives.
2. The flags are collection specific and they are not automatically passed from collection to collection. Time after time this has burned me. Flag a file as a pick in a collection and then switch back to seeing all of your photographs. Poof the pick flag is gone. Well, it’s not gone but it is collection specific.
It goes the other way too. Flag something in “All Photographs” and then add it into a collection. Within the collection sadly it is not flagged. Once you understand this design strategy it makes sense but it still drives me nuts.
Easier and safer to me are the stars and colored labels. I love and use the colored labels because these can be written to the file’s metadata and because they do not change with each collection.
Hope this helps,
David
I use CR2, but noticed there are no xmp files. When I tried to backup a series to a CD, I am scared that I can’t find the xmp files for all the changes I did. How can I find these, or how can I apply the auto write to xmp to photos I have already editted?
Dear TK,
Let’s check a couple of things. First, have you made a change to photos. Until you do something like adding keywords, adding a star rating or colored label, or changing the look of the photo in the develop module then there isn’t anything to write to the xmp sidecar. Second, are your files stile in .CR2 or have you converted them to DNG (See http://thelightroomlab.com/2009/06/converting-digital-camera-raw-files-to-the-dng-format-using-adobe-photoshop-lightroom/ for more on why I prefer DNG files.) Third, have you turned on the “Automatically write to XMP preference switch” or figured out how another way in Lightroom to save your metadata down to the file level?
I bet that either your files are now in DNG or that your metadata was never saved down to the file level. Let us know if my guesses are wrong!
–
David Marx