P: Auto-write changes to XMP

This makes a lot of sense to me.  Some years ago when I was doing work on electronic medical records there were some options that caused a save when the user's intent was merely to view an object.  This was a non-trivial problem.  I think there are many people who would prefer the way ACR works now when clicking Done.

I'm not  asking you to change workflow. I'm asking about consistent behavior over the three products or at the very least, two that “open” a raw. That could make it a practical matter in your request.

@andrew_rodney

I think its backwards and poorly designed, frankly. This seems like another case of the developers not eating their own dog food. I batch process thousands of images and have to do this stupid little dance with every one of them. And since ACR isn't scriptable I can't even write something to automate it. :sigh:

And yes it would be interesting to see what Lightroom does but as a practical matter, it doesn't help me a bit. I'm committed to the Bridge/ACR workflow.

I understand the settings are not out of the box and the presets are yours to initially see that preview. And I understand why you would want to have that now be written as such. I'm not against that change. But I also see and accept why it is “as designed”. I'm also still wondering about Lightroom. Are these three imaging apps on parity with each other? 

@andrew_rodney

When I open a file with an assigned preset, individual adjustment sliders are not in the out-of-the-box positions. That's why I use presets in the first place, to edit my RAW files.

I'm just asking for a way to save those adjustments when I click Done without having to dive into a menu to do so.

As I mentioned above, a preset isn't necessarily and edit as much as a means of creating a preview of data that must be rendered to even view. There can't be 'no' settings applied to show you raw data; it must be rendered somehow if you want to view it. Clicking 'Done' without anything further isn't any different (at least one could argue) than opening a TIFF with an embedded ICC profile used to create a preview, then closing it without any edits. You don't get a dialog to save it, there isn't anything to save. 

I can see the need, as you suggest, to allow that initial set of parameters to be described/saved. But I can also see why Adobe is doing what they are currently doing. 

@david_franzen 

That makes no sense, why would use of a preset assume that manual adjustments MUST be made? Presets are edits, are they not?

When a user opens multiple photos with defaults and adjusts some of them, all will show settings. Only writing some of them is confusing and an inconsistent UI. That's almost certainly a violation of the HIG for both platforms. A command should act consistently.

If I click "Done" then all opened files should be treated the same way. Not writing settings out for some files is deliberate data loss. I think if you have it only one way or the other, you should ALWAYS write settings to XMP, regardless of whether they are applied with a preset or manually.

I've got no dog in this fight (for a change ;-0 ) so I can see both perspectives. 

If you open a document in Photoshop and do nothing but view it, then close it, there is nothing to save and the request to save is never presented to the user; makes total sense. In a way, this is true here for ACR. The raw data must be rendered to be seen with some initial settings. Should just opening a raw and rendering to view alone be cause to force a save? 

Then there is Lightroom. You import a raw with some default settings just to see it (and build a preview to see it); is any XMP saved to the Catalog or DNG when this is done alone? If not, then I think the behavior seen in all three products which match, make sense. 

@lumigraphics We could consider a preference (your original request) to modify the behavior of the Done button. We think auto-writing default settings to files that haven't been edited at all when clicking Done would cause more problem than it might solve, so we would have to weigh the pros and cons of adding this as a preference very carefully. 

About the preset aspect of your workflow: using a preset for your defaults isn't relevant to how Camera Raw works in this scenario. Whatever the defaults--camera settings, Adobe's factory defaults, or a custom preset--until you edit a photo with an intentional action the photo has no settings, so when you click Done, so no settings are written out to file. We think camera defaults are useful to photographers who want to customize the starting point of their edits, and not the final edits.

@Rikk "Camera Raw does not add settings to a photo until you actually make an adjustment. This is as designed. "

Then I can only say that this is bad design. If one assigns a preset as camera default, and so a photo that is opened in ACR clearly has settings as a result of that preset, then it does not make sense that ACR does write an XMP file when you hit 'Done', but does not write these settings in the XMP file.