How to export/re-import photos with edits showing on Develop panel

[vanwy011]

I am curious how to export photos to my desktop/harddrive so when I re-import into LR the edits register on the right hand panel so I don't have to start the edit all over.  Right now when I re-import the photo shows edited, but the develop panel shows 0 for everything.  I am curious about this because I am thinking of cancelling my LR subscription.  Knowing my photos won't be saved, I am trying to see how I can export them with the capability of re-importing one day in the future with the edits saved.  Then if I want to tweak things down the road I can see where I made the edits initially.  Any help much appreciated, I can't find an answer to this anywhere!

[Tony_See]

I believe there  might be a couple of approaches to achieving this, so from your reading post this might help:

"The only option you have is to write metadata changes directly into the JPEG or not at all (storing them in the catalog only). This is true for all non-proprietary-raws: JPEG, TIFF, PNG, DNG, PSD.  

The command Metadata > Save Metadata To File writes the metadata manually, while the option Catalog Settings > Metadata > Automatically Write Changes Into XMP does it automatically.

Over the years, a number of people have asked for the option to use .xmp sidecars for non-raws, but in my opinion it is unlikely Adobe will implement it. 

See Lightroom/Camera Raw: Store the xmp metadata outside DNG, jpeg etc file to be backup efficient | Pho...

I haven't tested this, but you may have to "read" that data back into Lightroom (with the file selected) for it to appear in the Develop Panel, if that is your goal.

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

If you want to cancel your subscription, then the answer is that you can't. To save your edits you need to export the images as a (TIFF) copy with the edits applied to them. The reason is that edits are proprietary for each raw converter, so also for Lightroom. You can export an image 'as original' with the edits in an 'XMP sidecar file', but that will be next to useless if you want to cancel your subscription and start using other software. That other software won't read the edits. There are some software packages that claim they can read Lightroom edits, but in practise that is often disappointing. They can read the very basic edits, but not much more so most images still look quite different from how they looked in Lightroom.

If 're-importing them in the future' means you might come back to Lightroom after all, then you don't need to do anything. Just keep your Lightroom catalog and open that in the future version of Lightroom.

[vanwy011]

Thank you so much!! I do mean come back to Lightroom!  So just to confirm, I can cancel my subscription with LR, but when/if I come back to Lightroom in the future and keep my catalog the photos/edits won't be lost and I can see exactly what's been edited in the developer panel?

[dj_paige]

"Thank you so much!! I do mean come back to Lightroom! So just to confirm, I can cancel my subscription with LR, but when/if I come back to Lightroom in the future and keep my catalog the photos/edits won't be lost and I can see exactly what's been edited in the developer panel?"

YES.

in fact, when you cancel your subscription, you can still use the Library Module in Lightroom Classic to find and organize your photos and export the edited photos. In fact, when you cancel your subscription, all of Lightroom Classic still works except for the develop module and map module.