Apologies if this has been discussed before, but nothing came up in my search.
Having metadata fields for film stock and the original equipment used etc. is a welcome addition. I am now looking for a way to fill those fields with data logged on my phone without too much manual work. There is an application for Android devices called Exif Notes (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tommihirvonen.exifnotes) which I use to log data about each film and frame. It does require me to take my phone out after each exposure, which can be annoying, but I do like the benefit of knowing where, when and how my photos came to be.
I know there is exiftool to modify the EXIF data of RAW files, but can it see the NLP-specific fields? I also stumbled across the Lightroom plugin Capture Time to Exif (https://www.photographers-toolbox.com/products/jbeardsworth/jbcapturetimetoexif/index.php?sec=main) which does more than its name suggests and provides a decent interface for importing EXIF data into Lightroom, but seems to only be able to see fields that are native to Lightroom.
Worst case I will copy and paste the data into Lightroom, but if anyone has an idea on how to accomplish this in a less manual way, I would greatly appreciate it.
No, not until you’ve used the NLP custom export to write to exif, because on the raw file the NLP-metadata section itself is stored in the Lightroom catalog. This gives more flexibility when it comes time to export the image, as you can then determine how you want the NLP metadata to be presented into the standard EXIF fields. It also prevents errors on the original raw file that could be caused in some cases by trying to re-write the EXIF of the original RAW (for instance, changing the camera model fields could actually impact how Lightroom interprets the RAW and cause issues).
If you want to include the aperture and shutter speed you used for each individual capture, you will probably need to add those manually. Everything else should apply to the entire roll (like ISO, Camera model, lens, digitization, etc) so you only need to enter once, and then “sync” those metadata fields in Lightroom.
If you go to “file > export” in Lightroom, you’ll now see that there is an option to “export to” Negative Lab Pro. There are also new “export presets”, such as “NLP - Export for Flickr.”
These special export options will take the custom metadata you’ve added in the Negative Lab Pro metadata section, and write it to standard EXIF metadata wherever it can (based on the options you’ve selected in the export dialog).
So, for instance, if you export a JPEG for Flickr, it can create a custom caption based on the metadata you added, and overwrite the metadata of the digital capture with the metadata of the analog capture.
I see. But if duplicating files is what it takes, I’ll stick to good old copy & paste. Still, thank you for the explanation, Nate.
I have also contacted the creators of the aforementioned Capture Time to Exif plugin and will report back in case they come back with anything noteworthy.
@nate, Would you be open to adding a way to import metadata from, say, a CSV or JSON file? I started writing a plugin to do this myself, but unfortunately, it appears that one plugin cannot write to the custom metadata fields created by another plugin (Is there a way for a plugin to write to another plugin's custom metadata fields? | Lightroom Queen Forums). This means there’s no automated way to get metadata into the NLP custom metadata fields except through NLP itself.
My use case is to import JSON files from the Lightme Logbook app, but I’d like to clarify that I’m not asking if you’d support my desired JSON format, but just some machine-readable format. I’m happy to write the script to convert one to the other—less happy to type it all in by hand .
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