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phil-likes-this
Participant
December 1, 2018
Question

HEIC image import into Lightroom Classic produce xmp sidecars?

  • December 1, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 2987 views

Hi all,

maybe someone can shed light on this. I use the Lightroom App on my iPhone and Lightroom Classic (latest version) on my mac.

I realized that when I import .HEIC files into Lightroom Classic, it creates 2 files in the Masters folder: an .HEIC file and an .xmp sidecar file. My understanding is that HEIC can handle all the metadata in the file and does not need as sidecar. Is there a way to get Lightroom to consolidate this correctly?

I've tried importing directly into Lightroom Classic or via the iPhone App and CC with the same result.

I understand that I can tick "write to xmp" in the settings of Lightroom Classic - but even then, the moment you change any Metadata, a new xmp file gets created.

Many thanks and best regards,

Phil

    1 reply

    JohanElzenga
    Community Expert
    JohanElzengaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 1, 2018

    Apparently this is as expected. The .heic file format (HEIF) fully supports XMP and EXIF metadata, but Adobe probably doesn't have a metadata writer for the file format and the engineers found it expedient to write .xmp sidecars.

    -- Johan W. Elzenga
      johnrellis
      johnrellis
      Legend
      December 2, 2018

      To build on JohanEl54's reply, the HEIF format, which stores HEIC images and HEVC video, is based on the Apple QuickTime format, variations of which are used to store various video formats. LR has never had the capability of writing metadata back to these formats, unfortunately.

      Now if only LR would write .xmp sidecars for videos...

        P
        phil-likes-thisAuthor
        Participant
        December 4, 2018

        Thanks guys, that gave me just the colour I was looking for. Will stick to jpgs for the moment and await development

        Many thanks!

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