Copying LR6 keywords to original file

[IanHNW]

Hi

I have been using LR6 for a good number of years and hope to continue to do so, however I can't justify upgrading to the subscription model.  I therefore anticipate there may come a time at which I have to switch to a different catalogue tool.

I have started looking at Adobe Bridge, which is now free and seems as if it will fulfil my requirements, however I can't find any way to get my keyword associations out of Lightroom without exporting all of my images (a mix of NEF, CR2, JPEG, TIF and PSD).

I know (think) that there is a setting in Lightroom, which will cause the keywords to be written to a file, but that seems to only happen if the metadata is changed after enabling the option.  Is there any way to copy the keywords into the original source file metadata, so that Bridge can read it, without going through LR6 and touching every file?  I have been shooting digital for 12 years and have about 75,000 images stored.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Ian

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

No, you can't avoid "touching every file"....basically you have to save the metadata that's stored in the catalog to every individual image. You can enable the option to "Automatically write changes to XMP" in the Catalog Settings>Metadata tab, but to be absolutely certain that everthing has been done you can manually force that by selecting all images in the grid and pressing Cmd/Ctrl+S. That will embed the metadata into the individual files except for any proprietary raw files, for the latter the data is stored in XMP sidecar files.

[IanHNW]

Thanks, that's really useful. I knew that each file would have to be
touched in some way, what I was really trying to avoid was having to do it
manually, one by one. Your suggestion sounds like it could be just what I
was looking for.

Thanks again

Ian