P: Include Subject Distance Metadata

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
August 31, 2022
35 replies
3298 views

I'm sure this has been discussed before but I was not able to find any previous posts. Since the Fall of 2013 Lightroom no longer captures the subject distance into the Lightroom metadata. I remember hearing that subject distance was not considered to be accurate data and that's why it was dropped. I reviewed a bunch of my older images and subject distance seems reasonably accurate to me. I'd like to know who and why the decision was made to drop this data. And what it would take to once again start capturing it upon import. If the camera records data, it should be captured by Lightroom during import.

Windows

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Jeff A. GouldenAuthor

Inspiring

John, thanks for the response.

I use two cameras; Nikon D200 and Nikon D750. When I said that my pictures
before 2013 had subject distance and the pictures after that didn't I was
referring to the same Nikon D200. I don't think my D200 is causing the
problem. I use a custom metadata panel that I set up in Lightroom. It
includes subject distance. My D200 pictures taken before 2013 have subject
distance displayed in Lightroom. The D200 pictures taken after 2013 do not
have subject distance displayed.

I am assuming that my D750 captures subject distance but I don't know that
for sure. At any rate subject distance doesn't appear on my D750 pictures.

johnrellis

Legend

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"My custom metadata panel includes subject distance. However, it only displays the distance on image taken prior to 2013. Is Lightroom Classic once again capturing subject distance? I still don't see it displayed for images taken after 2013?"

As I described in my previous reply here, the issue is that newer cameras aren't recording the field EXIF:SubjectDistance. I just checked my test catalog, and it now has photos from 115 different camera models, 110 of which haven't recorded SubjectDistance:

I haven't done an exhaustive investigation, but It appears some cameras from some manufacturers are recording values in the non-standard proprietary MakerNotes metadata section, in fields variously named FocusDistance, FocusDistanceLower, FocusDistanceUpper, ManualFocusDistance, MinFocusDistance. LR's Metadata panel doesn't display any non-standard proprietary fields.

Jeff A. GouldenAuthor

Inspiring

My custom metadata panel includes subject distance. However, it only displays the distance on image taken prior to 2013. Is Lightroom Classic once again capturing subject distance? I still don't see it displayed for images taken after 2013?

johnrellis

Legend

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Subject Distance was removed from the Metadata panel in LR 3.4.1. But it was always available via custom metadata tagsets (which you could make manually or with the Metadata-Viewer Preset Editor plugin). LR 11 added back the ability to display Subject Distance via the Customize button:

My test catalog includes 95 different cameras from 15 different manufacturers, and only five record EXIF Subject Distance:

GoldingD

Legend

Your fellow members in this community are not Adobe. And we have no inside info.

Oh, some might have researched on this, perhaps using google. but not likely as the issue at hand is so much of no concern to perhaps all but a few.

Note that LrC does not show much metadata, lots of data not shown. Note also, that it does not alter that unshown metadata. Well perhaps unless striped on user purpose during export (and not all)

Incidentally, not all cameras fill that bit of metadata in.

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