LR Not Recognizing Ratings From Bridge

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
November 28, 2017
2 replies
5180 views

I am importing images into LR that have been viewed and rated in Bridge. LR is not seeing all the images rated in Bridge. Ideas and suggestions are greatly appreciated.

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R

richardplondon

Community Expert

It's been ages since I have used Bridge, but IIRC it operated in one of two working modes, controlled by an option setting.

One way is by tracking your metadata including new changes, internally only (in a "database" cache). This will not automatically reflect changes back to the image file on disk.

The other way, and the more usual AFAICT, is by saving out new metadata each time that gets changed, to the file on disk..

If a file was previously rated in Bridge, and Bridge did write this out to the file at the time, and now you import this to LR - LR will see that rating.

Except: if the file is a proprietary Raw, Bridge writes XMP into a separate sidecar file not into the file header. If you have left this sidecar file in the same folder alongside the Raw, and provided you leave their names alone, LR regards these two as a pair. BUT if you have separated them, or if their names no longer match, then LR won't know to associate them together.

Joe BtAuthor

Participating Frequently

I'll go a bit deeper into what I've done with this collection of images.

After downloading the files via Bridge, from card, I opened in Bridge, viewed and rated 1 and 2 stars. I have not changed the file names which is unusual for me. I've not added any metadata, not even the usual copyright info. So, when I sort the files by file names the image file and the XMP files are directly related. And, yes, they are all in the same folder. From what you said, that sounds like everything should still be copasetic. Right?

D

dj_paige

Legend

Richard,

It sounds like I am approaching LR from the wrong direction or with the wrong ideas in mind. Where should I go to get started properly? I've viewed many of the Help videos and watched some online webinars. Still, it seems I'm not doing something correctly. What do you suggest? THANKS

PS Can't believe you replied in the middle of the night (USA). I didn't mean for you to lose sleep over my issues. 8^)

https://forums.adobe.com/people/Joe+Bt wrote
Richard,
It sounds like I am approaching LR from the wrong direction or with the wrong ideas in mind. Where should I go to get started properly? I've viewed many of the Help videos and watched some online webinars. Still, it seems I'm not doing something correctly. What do you suggest? THANKS

Lightroom, compared to Bridge, is a different animal. It is a different approach to organizing your photos. And the advice for beginners is that you should not try to do things the same as you did in Bridge, or in your operating system. Throw all those ideas about organizing by folders out of your mind, get rid of them. You really want to adopt a totally new way of doing things.

I agree with everything Richard said, he has very good advice. Especially the part about importing once and only once. In other places, Richard has described the workflow that he uses (and that I use) which I strongly recommend, which is to handle each photo once and only once ... import it to it's final folder destination and leave it there. No more moving photos (or folders) from here to there*. This is an extremely simple workflow (a major benefit of Lightroom) and works very well for many beginners and many experts. it is simple and avoids problems and confusion that many people experience.

* — the only exception to the rule about not moving photos is when you have to move them to a new hard disk or new computer, then you move them, and you will need to understand how to do this when the time comes, people in this forum can help.

When you import your NEW photos, use the LR default of capture date (it takes no effort on your part), and then apply keywords to ALL of your photos (yes, ALL of them). Apply other metadata as needed (captions, titles, GPS locations, etc.) These are the tools you will use in the future to search for your photos, not folders.

What about photos you have already taken and are now in some folder hierarchy? Leave them there. Don't move them. Assign keywords to ALL of them (yes ALL of them), and apply other metadata as needed (captions, titles GPS locations, etc.) These are the tools you will use in the future to search for your photos, not folders.