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Anonymous

Answered

How do I save Lightroom image edits in source file?

Forum|Forum|13 years ago
February 18, 2012
7 replies
134680 views

My experience with the trial version of lightroom is very positive in terms of the convenient and powerful capabilities for editing images and the associated metadata. But I can't find a way to save the "develop" edits to images into the source file for the photo I am working with. So far, I am able to save the metadata into the file but not the image editing. From what I read, I fear this is not possible without silly round about exporting to new files then copying / moving multiple copies around, etc. Without this ability, I am pretty sure I will not purchase lightroom and will miss out on all the powerful features. Without an OPTION that turns on the equivalent of a SAVE button, managing my photos collection would be a nightmare.

So my question is: How do I save the edited (i.e., developed) version of a photo back into the same file where the original photo was stored?

Please, please spare me all the reponses telling me how stupid I am for wanting to do this and that the cognisenti and professionals would NEVER do this. But please just tell me there is a secret place to turn on this option in lightroom.

Thanks in advance.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer web-weaver

Papa Ben,

LR stores everything you do in its catalog. The word "catalog" in LR--speak denotes not your images but the data base where LR stores everything. This data base (the catalog) is a file with the ending < .lrcat> and you can see where it is located by going to >Edit >Catalog Settings >General tab.

This storing or saving to the catalog is happening constantly and automatically and you do not have to hit a <save> button.

Stored or saved in the catalog are your edits and everything regarding image management (including location of your image files), captions, keywords, etc.

For this reason it is all-important that you preserve and protect your LR catalog just as you have to preserve and protect your image files. That means you (a) should know the location of the catalog and (b) you should do back-ups regularly. Without the catalog you would still have your image files but your edits and all what you did in LR would be lost.

LR does not write into the original image file. But there is the possibility to save edits in a xmp-file which is a small file that (normally) sits besides the image file. You do this saving to xmp-file either in the Library Module by going >Metadata > Save Metadata to file (or shortcut Ctrl./Cmd. + letter "S"), or in the Develop Module by going >Photo >Save Metadata to file - or again Ctr. + S.

With DNGs it's a bit different; with DNGs Lr writes the edits into the header of the file. But the procedure is the same.

Saving to XMP (or into the header of a DNG) is not necessary because LR saves everything in its catalog - automatically. Saving to XMP (or into the DNG-header) has the effect that the edits you do in LR are now visible in any other Adobe program that can read XMP-files (or DNG files) - for instance Adobe Bridge. But for LR it is not necessary.

And there is one caveat: While LR saves everything in the catalog, not all the things you do in LR are written into XMP é DNG. So only the LR catalog saves everything you did in LR.

To answer your question: You do not have to save the edited version of a photo back into the original file. LR saves your edits in the catalog automatically and will display your edits because it reads the original image file and then applies the edits to it for display.

WW

am11038611

New Participant

I appreciate this is an old thread, but there are recent comments.

I have been using photoshop for about a year, but have scarcely opened Lightroom. I prefer to use the OS for sorting, backing up etc files and find Windows Explorer fine for my needs. So it's probable earlier versions of LR lacked the obvious solution to the OP question which I found after about a minute in the Classic CC version I have.

I had a folder with 235 files, all taken with the wrong white balance. I imported the folder, corrected the WB, synced the change to all 235 images, then with all selected, went to File Export. This opens a dialog, in which I selected

Export to: Same folder as original photo.

Existing Files: Overwrite without warning.

I unchecked all other boxes, except File Settings: JPEG Quality: 100% Color Space: sRGB

Then clicked EXPORT.

In Windows, hit F5, then opened the original folder. The few original jpgs have been overwritten. The original raw files are untouched.

This appears to be the requested "Burn to JPEG , but don't come whining afterwards" option and seems most usable.

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sandra4785

New Participant

I'm using Lightroom to straighten tilted horizons automatically. I care about straight horizons, but I don't care about image quality, so I shoot jpg and want to override my files.

Lightroom is forcing you to use a certain workflow and you just have to accept this if you want to use it. That's just part of the deal. No need to fight it, just go with the flow.

That's what I do:

Lightroom - export the changed images:

Export dialog: Rename to "Filename - Sequence". Start sequence with 1.

Windows Explorer:

Sort the images by filename. Then delete every second image. These should be all images that don't end with a 1.

Or use a tool like Fast Picture Viewer and mark every image with a tilted horizon for deletion.

This gives you a way to quickly delete all original images.

C

cyds6819614

New Participant

hi, I tried your method of exportin the file as original. At first it worked but now for some reason when I export s file as original or dng it doesn't export with the edits I've made to the image. Any ideas what is happening.

Thanks

Just Shoot Me

Brainiac

Export as original will do just that, Export the original file without any adjustment. I've never test exporting as DNG but IIRC it should include the edits but they are only viewable in LR.

B

beng63798078

New Participant

This is a fine answer, but the problem the user asks is very real. I've dealt with other programs

(picasa, for instance), that store meta data elsewhere. It becomes a mess when you want to

(almost inevitably) switch programs. I have no reason to believe that Lightroom, great as it is,

will be around forever, or be my preferred program. Of course, there could be problems with reading the file format as well, but JPEG (IMHO) is more likely to be readable than adobe's lightroom database format!

I really want to be able to easily recreate my set from a simple directory structure and set of

files. Ideally, if there is a simple workflow to 'export' an image after it is edited (a keyboard shortcut perhaps) - that would be adequate....

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NickHark

New Participant

I cannot resist replying to this old thread. My inner self is screaming at the Adobe’s and other “fanboy” responses, “you are not listening to your customers.”

I too am an old guy, in my mid-seventies, having dabbled with computers since 1975. I have been using photo and video software since they were first created. I started with Lightroom at ver 4, and I have asked this question, and followed Adobe over the years, looking for a way to save my changes to the original photo. Adobe always stamps its foot and says, “Yes we understand, but that’s not how it’s designed.” Thus, Adobe steadfastly refuses to give its customers what they want.

My needs are simple. I have a photo library of 30,000 photos and growing. I am adding numerous photos using my new Epson FastFoto FF-380W scanner. When I am satisfied with my photos after processing them, I upload them to my Netgear ReadyNAS. Since I have a Plex Media Server on my ReadyNAS, my wife and I can view them on our TV using ROKU on which is a Plex app.

Because of Adobe’s steadfast resistance, I am forced to edit the original photo files (jpg) using lightroom’s “edit in Photoshop” link for each photo. Of course, I edit the original because I have long since learned not to rely on any photo that lightroom displays without verifying that it is the original. I thus can share any of my 30,000 photos with my friends using my Plex app on my OnePlus 7 Pro smartphone.

I love the way lightroom is designed, except for the foregoing, since my photos, going back more than 40 years, can be massaged on my Windows 10 PC. I keep the library on my PC and Lightroom interacts with that. I run a cloning batch file to synchronize my PC photos and Lightroom catalog with the ReadyNAS.

I came to Adobe today thinking that the ability to save changes to a jpg might have been added by Adobe, but “No’, they must maintain the original design. I’m just a typical sucker because I have paid for Lightroom over the years because I don’t have the time to go try to find something as robust for me. Adobe seems to dare someone to come up with a replacement.

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Anonymous

Maybe what Lightroom needs is a "burn to JPEG" command which makes a JPEG copy of a photo with all adjustments and metadata written to it, and stacks it with the original. A kind of hard copy. It could have a special icon badge to visually differentiate it.

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NathanChilton

Participating Frequently

Another easy option would be to just select all the files that you want to replace with processed versions, export them to the same directory as the originals (and telling it to rename the new files to avoid conflicts), and then mark the selected files as rejected. As soon as the export is complete, delete all rejected files.

I do this all the time with my 0-star photos. If they don't make the cut, but I'm afraid I might want to keep them -- just in case -- I'll select my 0-star photographs, export to same directory (as JPGs or now as 2mp lossy compressed DNGs), and mark as rejected. I then delete the rejects after the export is completed. In this manner, I am essentially replacing the original files with the processed versions (though the filename has an extra number on the end). It's quick and easy.

D Fosse

Community Expert

From time to time you see this argument that "there is no one single right way" to do things. Well, sometimes there is. Saving over your originals is plain wrong, and it shouldn't be encouraged. If the Lr engineers provided such an option it would go against the whole idea of Lightroom, and so it can safely be established once and for all that it will never happen.

Now, what people do on their own time is their own business. If they want to hold a match to their negatives they can do so. But this is a forum dedicated to best practices, and so people would be advised to do this to a copy, not the original.

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smart_fr

New Participant

I had the same requirement to save in JPEGs files all non-metadata edits performed in Lightroom, in order to share modified pictures without duplicating files. By the way, I think it’s going to be more and more required by casual Lightroom users, as people get used to instant photo sharing in many situations where quantity matters more than quality

Here’s a nearly automatic (at least, scalable) solution that works, although it slightly lowers the quality by re-compressing the original pictures.

Once for all:

Download and install the wonderful Lightroom plugin “jf Run Any Command”, provided as donationware by Jeffrey Friedl here: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/run-any-command. This “export filter” plugin allows you to run a command of your choice with each exported file, as part of the export while it’s going on. (You may also browse Jeffrey’s blog to find many other useful and beautiful things.)
In Lightroom, pre-define an export settings as follows:
- Export to the hard drive, to the original picture folder, without adding the exported file to the catalog
- Name the exported file “EXPORTED-{Filename}” (or anything different from the original file name)
- JPEG format, 76% quality (see An Analysis of Lightroom JPEG Export Quality Settings at http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/jpeg-quality)
- Keep all metadata
- Here’s the interesting part, the Run Any Command settings:
  - Command to execute for each exported picture: copy "{FILE}" "{Path}\{LIBRARYFILENAME}" (this replaces the original file with a copy of the exported file)
  - Command to execute upon export completion: del {FILES} (this deletes all exported files).

NB: One could wonder why not directly export with the original file name and silently replace the original files (I believe Lightroom would allow this). It’s just a matter of error handling: in case the export goes wrong, no original file is changed at all.

The easy part: each time you want to save edits:

In Lightroom, select the pictures to save, and export them with the pre-defined settings. You're almost done. The JPEG files are ok, but inside Lightroom you see the modification effects doubled, as their specifications remain in the catalog database and they apply on modified JPEG instead of the original files.
While the entire set of "saved" pictures is still selected, in the Develop module switch Autosync on and click Reinit to erase all modification specifications from the catalog for all pictures, then press CTRL-S to write down to disk any metadata updated by Lightroom -and accept if required to confirm that Lightroom values should replace externally set values.

Stephane

PS: Papa Ben, I'm curious about the decision you finally made

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Anonymous

Thanks for the carefully thought out suggestion, Stephane.

I did buy LR3 and worked with it for a month or so -- trying a few different "workflows" to keep track of all the copies of photos. Strangely I was finding myself struggling to make the sophisticated and powerful "developing" tools lighten shadows and darken highlights -- a frequent need of mine -- to my satisfaction. So I upgraded to LR4 because the relevant "slider bars" had supposedly been upgraded to be more effective. After a couple months with LR4, I found myself thinking I really had been doing better with the simple sliders in Photoshop Elements. So I picked out a batch of photos with strange backlighting, etc. and gave it my best shot with both programs on several photos. I found myself spending many minutes with all the sophisticated LR tools and I could not do as well as I could in a few seconds with Photoshop Elements. I also do a lot of cropping. Here again, LR has it's own bass-ackwards approach which I'd eventually get used to, but I tend to use different tools on different computers to get my work done so this is another nuisance. And the thing I do for almost every photo is enter a caption/title and (for scanned photos) change the "date taken." This I can now easily do in Windows Explorer.

I began wondering why I really need a "workflow" at all for my modest photo editing needs. I'm just an old man racing to get our huge collection of digital and print photos digitized, documented with metadata, "developed" in very simple ways (crop, straighten, lighten shadows, darken highlights for the most part). Do I really want to spend my time reading books about (and then trying to remember) how to set up a proper lightroom workflow and manage the overwhelming number of powerful tools or do I want to get on with the work?

Bottom line is that my workflow for the last 6 weeks is as follows:

Windows Explorer for adding and editing metadata
Picasa (fast and fun to use) if I only have to straighten and crop photos
Photoshop Elements (clunky but effective) if I need to lighten shadows and darken highlights

It's interesting that Picasa keeps a copy of the original when I save my edited file. But it does let me save the file in place and stores the original in a handy, but out of the way, subdirectory in case I need to go back to it. Very nice.

Thelonius Monk summed it up: "Simple ain't easy." Adobe does more than most companies to prove Thelonius right.

Thanks again,

-- Papa Ben

S

smart_fr

New Participant

I understand, Papa Ben.

I'm new to Lightroom, and still under the magic of discovery, but really enjoying its superior ability to dynamically select pictures according to pre- and user-defined criteria, as well as to automate publishing (with one ore two plugins installed). I don't use 10% of the Develop tools, but found the ones I use pretty well designed. The big flaw is this missing Save button for casual users like us...

Thanks for sharing your experience. Have a nice and long race!

Stephane

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asd23e

Participating Frequently

You did not specify what file type you are working with. From what I know, or think I know, You can only save this data imbedded in the file only if the file-type is .DNG. If you are editing a .jpg or raw file, you will get a sidecar xmp file with the develope edits. I don't know if there is any such software that can do what you are hoping to do. Perhaps propriatary software from Canon, Nikon, etc. can embed into their own raw file, but such software generally has such limited functionality. This is the main reason Adobe created the "open source" .DNG file type in the first place. "open source" in this case is a misnomer as Adobe has a pattent on the file type. .DNG really needs to be unlocked from the clenches of Adobe for it to insure success, if it even can.

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Anonymous

To show you what an amateur I am, I use jpeg files for my photos. Previously I have used Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Picture It, Paint Shop Pro and a number of other products that have a "SAVE" button that allows me (after suitable warning pop ups) to save my edited image -- horror of horrors -- right in the same file where the original source image was before. I find the metadata and image editing (developing in LR lingo?) feature of LR superior to these others for my needs, but LR apparently will not allow me to do what all those other packages allow me to do, that is, store my edited image in the same file where the original unedited image was to begin with. If I can't find an OPTION for doing this, I'm afraid that's a showstopper for me. Pleas understand I'm not suggesting that LR force users to do this, only that they provide an OPTION which allows users to do it if they choose to turn on that option.

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asd23e

Participating Frequently

Again, my take would be to keep the original file untouched and save a duplicate images in the same folder (Image01_v2.jpg) I believe once you make all the edits you would export the image to the same direstory as the original. At this point you would have two images, Image01.jpg and Image01_v2.jpg. You need to keep in mind that LR is a non-destructive editing process. This keeps the original image unedited,but can apply these changes when desired, preferable to a separate file.

With standard editing software you may make all the adjustments to the original and save the same file. But down the line, if your monitor was giving you a poor representation of the image, the edited file will need to be tweaked again....reducing its quality with each new edit.

web-weaverCorrect answer

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