# Changing the Metadata Panel Contents



## PatrickC (Jul 26, 2012)

In this thread http://www.lightroomqueen.com/community/showthread.php?11893-Customizing-your-Metadata-panel Mark Sirota explains how to change what fields are displayed in the metadata panel.

I have Jeffrey Friedl's plugin but it doesn't give me the result I want. Specifically I want some of the items from two plugins - Paul Kamphuis's Photoshelter Publish Service and Jim Keir's Alamy uploader - but I don't want them all. I can see them all using Jeffrey's 'All Plug-in Metadata', but they show up in the .lrtemplate as a single item, com.adobe.allPluginMetadata. I've been trying to get my head around doing it by editing an existing one in Notepad, but I'm not getting far.

1. The folder seems to have moved (?LR4) to (user)\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Metadata Field Lists
2. I copied a preset I made using Jeffrey's plugin and edited it, but it doen't show up in the dropdown list, even if I close & reopen Lightroom.
3. I don't know where to find the names of the available fields in the plugin. I've got the LrToolkitIdentifier, from the info.lua file for the plugin, but I don't know where to find the plugin's template which shows up in the dropdown list of metadata viewer presets - I've searched the whole drive for .lrtemplate files and it's not there.

Any help will be much appreciated. I've put off dealing with this for months, making do with jumping between viewer presets.

Patrick Cunningham


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## johnbeardy (Jul 26, 2012)

Try creating a metadata preset with these plug-ins' fields and examining it in a text editor. You're going to need the plug-in ID and the field name.

But custom metadata do present risks that if the plug-in author encrypts the field definition, the user needs some skill to figure out the field names and retrieve any metadata. So if the author ceases support, there is a risk of your data being lost or too difficult to recover when you need it. Because of this, I never encrypt my field definition file (which is inside the plugin file).

John


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