I use Meta35 from Promote Systems to download metadata from my Nikon F6 and then write it to my image files after they have been scanned. I’ve had no issues over many rolls of film with scanned negatives from an Epson V600 in TIF or JPG format that were processed using NLP.
I recently decided to try using my D800 to photograph a roll instead scanning because the workflow seemed to be faster. I capture the images directly from Lightroom using the Tethered Capture tool and then process the NEF files with NLP to create positive copies in JPG format. I then import the metadata from the Nikon F6 into the JPG files using Meta35. The problem I’ve run into is that the Meta35 application will not write the metadata from the camera into the JPG files produced by NLP. I can get around this by entering the metadata using ExifTool manually but this is painful and time consuming.
Does anyone out there use Meta35? Have you had this problem? If so, how did you solve it?
The digital camera workflow is a lot faster than scanning so I’d like to figure out how I can use Meta35 toimport the metadata from the camera directly into the JPG files that are produced by NLP.
I’m using NLP version 2.3.0 and Lightroom Classic version 11.5
Have you contacted Promote Systems for support? They might be a) interested in the camera scanning method and b) be able to provide clues or a fix…
I suppose that Meta35 is trying to write a tag that is absent in a scanned image file, but not in a digicam image file. Meta35 is possibly not set to overwrite existing tags, which could explain the issue.
You could check the files with exiftool -G -a -u and see what’s in the files and in which tags.
I did contact Promote Systems and they had never seen the error and didn’t have any suggestions. Also, I just got an email from them stating that they are going offline and to make sure I downloaded the documentation and latest version of the software. I suppose this means no further development of the software. Sign of the times I guess. The Meta35 tool is simple and useful for managing the metadata from my camera. Although there seems to be a bit of a renaissance in film photography the integration of film camera metadata into the digital world is not following along.
Thanks for the hint about checking the files to see whats in the tags. I’ll have a look.
I’m not sure why this would be happening. If you get any specific error messages, it would be helpful to know.
One thing you can try:
Instead of using the “positive copy” feature to create JPGs, you should try using Lightroom’s regular “file > export” tool.
Within the export tool, you can either export as a regular JPG (try this first, this should not create or change your metadata in any way), or you can set the “export to: Negative Lab Pro” and manually edit all the NLP metadata export settings directly to see if you find what is causing the issue.
It was a Windows issue that was affecting quite a few other applications so I went ahead and installed a clean copy of Windows and now everything seems to be working as expected. Thanks for following up.