Importing Sidecar Files

[NatalieWW]

I am backing up a series of photos from CDs to an external hard drive (Mac). Suddenly, I'm seeing all the sidecar files with athe Apple Photos icon in the files. This has not happened before. Should this happen?

[Peru Bob]

This is  the poorly named Community Help forum (which is the forum for issues using the forums).
Please tell us what Adobe application you are using so that this can be moved to the proper forum for help.

[Nancy OShea]

It's harmless.  Your device is associating those image files with Apple Photo.  You can tell your OS to re-associate those file types to another app of your choice -- Photoshop, Lightroom, etc...   If you're not sure how, Google it for your particular OS.

[NatalieWW]

Thanks. I guess I should have been more specific. I'm using Bridge on a Mac (Catalina). I noticed these Apple Photo logos as sidcar images on an import and then deleted them from the Bridge library, which I guess wasn't a good thing to do since all my keywords associated with the images went away. Anyway, I was able to drag all the sidecar images back from trash into my library and all is good now. But here's thing thing: These sidecar images only appear in the import of about 100 images in a thumbnail view. If I deselect Show Hidden Files, I don't see the sidecar images. Should I worry? I hate to think I've entered all these keywords and all that work is going to just disappear!

[Nancy OShea · Accepted solution]

I don't use a Mac but this sounds more like a question for Apple.  Or whichever app was used to create the images, keywords, etc...

[gary_sc]

HI Chrisste,

Sidecar files contain metadat associated with their matched images. So if you have a photo "myphoto.jpg," you will also find a sidecar files called "myphoto.xmp." The sidecar files contain anything from keywords to image adjustments to copywrite data depending on what was placed to the image.

More typically, jpg, .pds, tif images, and others do not get sidecar files for anything but adjustments. They are more commonly associated with raw files that cannot be altered as they rely upon sidecar files for how the image is interpreted. Adobe introduced the DNG (Digital Negative) format for several reasons, one of which is that the DNG format is a container file so the sidecar is not necessary and that data is contaned within the DNG format but again, the raw data inside is not altered. Some people, such as myself, have completely adopted the DNG format while others have not. It is a personal choice. You can convert most any raw file into a DNG format with Adobe's DNG Converter. 

While you can save a jpg as a DNG from within Adobe Camera Raw, there really isn't any real benefit to do that other than to not lose your sidecar file for that image (but I'm still puzzeled as to why you might have any sidecar file for a jpg image but that's another issue).

One of the negatives of reliance upon sidecar files is that if they, and the image they represent are separated, all of the data is also separated from the file as you have observed. 

While I am a Mac user, I have never used Photos, so I do not know how Photos interacts with sidecar files, which type of files get them and which do not. I'm sorry I cannot help you in that regards.

Good luck (and keep those sidecar files until you KNOW you do not need them (if ever)).