How to have LR automatically read and apply edits made in Camera Raw/Bridge?

[eye=art]

This used to happen automatically. For reasons of expediency, I need to edit a few images quickly before importing a whole shoot into LR. So I open Bridge and edit in CR. Even put in star ratings and color labels. Then when I import the images into LR, all of these edits show exactly as I entered them, and I can continue to edit further in LR.

I'm on a Mac, OS 11.7 (Big Sur) working with the latest LRC 12.0.1 and Camera Raw 15.0.

The edits I made in Camera Raw are not appearing in LR. I know I can select Metadata > Read from File but I have 100s of images to go through and need to have this automated, to work like it did before.

So what do I have to enable in LR for this to happen? And do I have to enable anything in Camera Raw as well? Do I have to turn on the option to write to xmp sidecar, which is now turned off? Is there a downside to enabling the xmp option? I see a lot of people in this forum saying negative things about it.

TIA.

[richardplondon]

Edits made by opening camera files into ACR before importing to LrC, also metadata applied from within Bridge, will indeed need to have been written in XMP to the file, and then Lightroom Classic will show them at import. There is no setting within LrC that switches off this behaviour.

Bridge's own database is not accessible to LrC. So if that is where your work within Bridge is happening - those ratings won't then make it into the Catalog. A Bridge setting IIRC lets you employ external XMP on the file instead of its own database, and that is what you require here. 

In the specific case of DNGs AFAIK LrC is going to be both expecting to read from, and also will itself write to, the DNG file itself. I don't think you would want to set ACR to use separate XMP sidecars instead (that LrC may then not know to look for).

IMO any hybrid working combining LrC and Bridge can be expected to be at least complex, and at worst problematic, compared with using either one of those end-to-end. Inherently so: opposed working paradigms.

[eye=art]

Is it possible to create an xmp file or sidecar in Canera Raw or Bridge AFTER the inage has been processed? Thanks. 

[richardplondon]

My own familiarity with Bridge is clearly very out of date - I just reinstalled it out of curiosity, and can't find the former setting that I thought I recalled, for internal vs external metadata handling. So please take that idea with a grain of salt - sorry. Perhaps it was the database used by PS Elements, not Bridge, that I was remembering.

So, maybe check the OS permissions to see whether writing new external XMP files into those folders, is an allowed action for Bridge to do.

There is something (as I mentioned) within ACR's settings relating to how DNG metadata writing happens, whether inside the DNG or outside the DNG, but AFAIK that is just for DNG specifically. Adobe applications seem to always use (or try to use) separate XMP files when writing metadata to proprietary camera Raw files other than DNG. And to write metadata into the file with camera JPG: though there is a setting available within LrC to prevent this from happening at all, LrC does not depend on doing this anyway, since it is relying on the Catalog as primary.

[JohanElzenga]

Nothing has changed, Lightroom should still read the XMP file on import. Check that you do not apply a develop preset on import, that overrides the ACR XMP data. This preset could also be a custom camera default setting. 

[Jao vdL]

What you describe is how it has always been. Any settings you do in ACR before you import the images into LightroomC were always applied upon import. After import you have to manually read metadata from file to get the ACR settings to be recognized by Lightroom C. Always been that way. There has never been an automatic read from xmp sidecars. So not sure what you were remembering. Even if you have the option "Automatically write changes into XMP" turned on, Lightroom Classic will not automatically read any external changes. It might warn that the metadata has been changed externally but will only apply any changes if you manually do a read from metadata. Worse, it will even overwrite the changes if you do any edits in Lightroom before you have read the changes. Again this is how it has always been. Lightroom considers its catalog the authorative source of metadata. The xmp sidecars are just backup copies of the changes.

Only downside of using the automatic metadata writing is that it can slow down Lightroom considerably. 

[eye=art]

So I need to update the status of my issue. Turns out whatever it was had nothing to do with my updating the OS. The files that are missing in one folder showed up in another because of the merge. So at least nothing was lost. 

Then, the edits I made in Camera Raw/Bridge -- which I, apparently mistakenly, thought should automatically show up in Lightroom bu don't ... well a tip I saw on selecting "Read Metadata from File"  solved that problem: all my edits materialized!  

Thanks, everyone, for your helpful input!