July 2, 2007
Lightroom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder (for Lightroom 1.1)
Source: Jeffrey Friedl’s Blog
Author: Jeffrey Friedl
Jeffrey Friedl last week posted an update to his Custom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder. You can go direct to Jeffrey’s Lightroom Metadata-Viewer Preset Builder page and use his online tool to create custom Metadata panel presets. But we highly recommend you read the post of instructions first.
Jeffrey writes:
As mentioned in my previous post, Adobe has just released Lightroom 1.1, a free upgrade to their wonderful photo-workflow application. Correspondingly, I have upgraded my Custom Metadata Viewer Preset Builder, a web application that allows you to create custom metadata display configuration templates for use within Lightroom.
This post is the introduction and documentation for my template-builder application. If you have used the previous version, you’ll find lots of new things here, including new metadata items, new display options, and even the ability to set label text.
- Introduction
- Viewer Presets vs. Data Presets
- Obligatory Disclaimer
- Quick Overview
- Using the Application
- Menu Buttons
- Display Options
- Overriding Label Text
- Wide, No Label, Empty Label
- Installation
- General Notes
- Colophon
An example of Lightroom 1.1′s metadata display panel is shown at right. The panel is capable of showing much more information about an image than anyone’s likely to want to see at one time — over 100 items, such as the image filename, the latitude/longitude where it was taken, the shutter speed, a caption, etc.— the volume of which can quickly overwhelm.
To whittle down the display to a smaller set of items, Lightroom comes with a number of built-in display presets (Default, All, EXIF, IPTC, Large Caption, Location, Minimal, and Quick Describe), each showing a different subset of the possible items. But because there are so many items that might be shown, chances are small that a built-in presets shows just the items you wish to see.
This is where my web application comes in: with it, you can create your own display-configuration presets. The one shown at right is the one I made for my own daily use.
Viewer Presets vs. Data Presets
I must be clear up front that this post is about selecting which fields to display, in what order, and with what labels. It is not about “this field is assigned this value” Metadata Presets that Lightroom already allows you to create and edit. (For what it’s worth, you can access those presets via the “Preset” selector seen just under the red-circled “Jeffrey’s View” in the screen capture shown at right.
Obligatory Disclaimer
Custom metadata-viewer presets, from this or any source, are not supported by Adobe. There are no guarantees that the presets you build for Lightroom Version 1.1 will be at all useful with later versions of Lightroom. In fact, there are no guarantees that they’ll be useful with any version of Lightroom.
“Use at your own risk.”