P: Read and write video metadata into video or sidecar

Feature request for functionality to ‘Update EXIF Metadata from File’ for video files.

Over time I have ended up with a lot of video files in my Lightroom Classic catalog that have missing or messed up exif meta data, this has various causes but let’s just leave it at that… various causes. 

Now there are some brilliant plugins that can correct these exif meta data items and write them back to the imported video file from within Lightroom Classic (e.g. ExifTool based jb CaptureTime to EXIF).

The only problem is to get this corrected data back into Lightroom Classic, as Lightroom Classic currently (and since long) does not support the ‘Read Metadata from File’ and ’Save Metadata to File’ for video files.

The requested feature would add an Metadata option to read these items from the original video file and update them in Lightroom Classic catalog. 

Relevant EXIF meta data items for video would be those that can be successfully updated by aforementioned plugins, most notably: Camera make, Camera model, Lens, Lens info, Lens model, Serial. But the more the better.  

i would like to save GPS metadata to my video files but this is not possible with Lightroom. Please do so as if metadata can be written to image files I am sure it should be also possible to video files.

And as many people have already stated before No I do not trust Lightroom databases but i trust the info being embedded in the files. A much more fool proof method to store information. No possibility to loose the attached info unless it gets corrupted. With Lightroom so many things have gone wrong with Databases that i just use it with images to input data and quickly save that data to files . I wish this could be also possible with video files.

Thank you.

With so many photos and videos being taken with our phones and with DSLR cameras, and even motion pictures being dumped into the same folder, it only makes sense to allow for the video files to also contain the metadata that we edit in Lightroom Classic. Right now the recommended work around is to use Adobe Bridge, but if you have hundred's of keywords, Bridge is unusable, it requires you to hunt for keywords by scrolling through hundreds of keywords (which amounts to a cruel and unusual punishment!). I would rather stick with Lightroom Classic's amazing user interface, it's so much better! In terms of workflow, to tag a photo with six keywords in Lightroom Classic takes me around two seconds. But in Bridge, to do the same might take a minute or two! As a result I just avoid Bridge all together, which means I have thousands of videos mixed with my photos that simply are not keyword tagged. They are gone but not forgotton!

Since videos and photos are ubiquitous now, and since most people tend to shoot video as well as photograph important events, it only makes sense for Lightroom C. to allow for the simple inclusion of saving metadata to the video file. Thank you.

"remember a problem with waitForRender() which never seemed to complete when the rendition is a video."

Sounds plausible. My experience with LrExportSession has been limited to exporting images from a regular plugin, with no experience with export plugins or exporting video.

You might ask Friedl, since I think his Run Any Command plugin works with video.

I was looking at this before and remember a problem with waitForRender() which never seemed to complete when the rendition is a video. It seems fine with other file formats. Does that make sense to you?

for i, rendition in exportContext:renditions() do
-- Wait until Lightroom has finished rendering this photo.
local success, pathOrMessage = rendition:waitForRender()
local rendPath = rendition.destinationPath
LrDialogs.message (rendPath)

When I export photos and videos from LRC, I noticed that the exported videos lose their star rating (if they had one).

I am using the following settings in the export dialog:

 - Checked "Include Video files"

 - Video format: Original, unedited file

The files in question are MP4 and MOV files which are able to have star ratings - which I confirmed by being able to manually set the star rating of exported files using Windows File Explorer.

System Info: LR version: 12.4, Windows vesion 11.

Why is this valuableto me: I like to show my vacation photos and videos to family, friends. For this, I export the photos as JPG's and further include any video files. Since on a typical vacation I shoot more photos & videos than can be shown in a reasonable time, I mark a selection of them using the "Select [P]" command (white flag) in LRC. To preserve this selection outside of LRC, I assign a star rating to the selected photos and videos before exporting them. That way, I can apply the a filter on the PC that I use to limit the slide show to that selection, while having the full set of  photos, videos available in someone is interested in more detail.

Thanks, Adriaan Sachtler

I don't take many movies but have a few, and these get uploaded along with images from my phones and cameras to LrC.

I make a great effort to update my images with a host of meta data, along with keywords and captions

I can use the Meta data -> Save Metadata to File option and this updates all my jpg image, but give an error for my movie files.

Since the movie files ALSO have the same properties available (as seen in windows file prorperties view) - I don't understand why the LrC app can't update those property fields within the original windows file.

It would be helpful if this restriciton was remove and the updates also applied to any selected MOVIE files. 

This data would then be available to all apps viewing the movies, not just within LrC.

I often add captions, titles and capture times (usually to reflect changes in time difference) and geolocations to my videos on lightroom, but whenever I export them all the metadata disappears - the only information retained is the date and time, which is changed to the date and time of export.

I use a variety of cameras (iPhone, DSLR, drone, gopro) and shoot using video and stills and the timestamps are particularly important for me to understand what happened in any particular day. This chronology is preserved when I import the files into lightroom, but is lost as soon as export the media for archival.

So, 9.5 years later after this thread was started, and it appears that Lightroom still doesn't allow you to write the metadata to a video file?  I'm new to Lightroom.  For years I've searched for a good program to organize my photos and videos.  I've resisted Lightroom because I hate having to pay a monthly subscription for software.  But, that's neither here nor there.  I finally gave in and decided to try LR Classic, and I was really starting to like it, until I changed metadata in a ton of video files only to have it not save to the file.  So, it appears that if I do add metadata, it is fine as long as I've viewing my files within LR, but if I take them anywhere else, it's all lost.  Right?  I bet there are a lot of people out there that don't even realize this, otherwise this thread would get a lot more upvotes.

So, if LR is not truly capable of organizing video files, what progam is?  How do you go about writing metadata to your video files?  Is the answer to keep my photos and videos separate and manage them separately with different software?  I hate that idea, but I will do it if it means I will actually keep my stuff organized.

Thanks.

Thanks for the idea. The forum does not automatically apply a "vote" to your post so don't forget to click the green arrow in the upper left.