# Lightroom / Photo Supreme



## Sandyjas (Dec 15, 2014)

Please help with any information.  I have a Mac (Mountain Lion 10.8.4) and Lightroom 5.  I also got Photo Supreme software for the one feature on it that saves metadata of photos to a text file.  (I am aware that there are Lightroom plug-ins that do this, but I have not the time yet for them, as I am a newer Lightroom user.  I know this would be an easy thing to acquire and use one of these plug-ins but I really don't have the time yet and I will try and use Photo Supreme for getting some of my photo's metadata to a text file at first.)   Is it a bad idea to have Lightroom (a database) and Photo Supreme (a database) open at the same time?

Thank You for any information,

Thank You,

Sandy


----------



## LouieSherwin (Dec 16, 2014)

Hi Sandy,

Basically there shouldn't be any problems running two database applications at the same time unless Photo Supreme is actually trying to read the Lightroom database. However if Photo Supreme is trying to update the metadata within the actual image files on your hard drive you will want to be very careful with how you use Photo Supreme. You can easily get your metadata quite scrambled. If on the other hand you use Photo Supreme to only read the image metadata and print  as you suggest it is possible but there are some things you need to aware of.

Other than the metadata (EXIF mostly) in the original image file, Lightroom by default keeps all its additional metadata (IPTC, keywords etc.) internally in it's own data base. So in order of other applications to be able to see that metadata it has to be explicitly written out to the image file or in the case of raw files to the XMP sidecar file. This can be done on demand with a CMD-S (CTL-S) or automatically by turning on the "Automatically write changes to XMP" option in the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog. However, some things like Collections are not saved even when using this option.

There are some side effects that you should also consider when saving metadata to the images. For every image type except raw, the image file on your disk is updated each time you save the metadata. This will cause your backup to backup the whole image file again. So making metadata changes to a lot of images can create large backups. If your image files are all raw then only the modified XMP sidecar files will be backed up. Since these are small they do not affect backups much.

A better option would be to make a  Export preset to export all the images that you wish to print with Photo Supreme to temporary location on your hard drive. The export function by default automatically embeds all the Lightroom metadata in the exported image as well as all your Lightroom adjustments. This would probably be a cleaner approach. 

Finally you can easily check out the LR/Mogrify 2 plug-in which combines the export with the addition any kind of additional text/graphics to the images. It is available as donation ware which means you can try it out and later make a donation if  you find it useful.

-louie


----------



## Sandyjas (Dec 19, 2014)

Yes I only want to list some metadata in a text file for about 60 photos in a folder with Photo Supreme.  I'm probably not going to use the Lightroom photos for it, only the Originals, which mirror the Lightroom working photos.  I need to import these photos (my seperate Originals which Lightroom knows nothing about, or copies of them, into Photo Supreme [at this point these photos will have all their metadata on them]).  Then I tell Photo Supreme which metadata fields I want to list out with every photo in that folder.   Photo Supreme will list this out in a text file.  You probably know way more about this.  I would have to refer to my exact notes on how this goes.  Anyway, I am only using Photo Supreme to read the photos.  My only concern was, because this text file is going to be an ongoing element in my work flow for processing  my new photos, that at some point, by mistake, I might have both Lightroom and Photo Supreme on at the same time and I didn't want any problems.    I am about to start importing to Lightroom for the first time, so, I don't want to add any plug-ins at this time.  But in the future I might want to use "List View" in place of Photo Supreme.   That maybe seems like a cleaner approach to me! Ha!  If List View works as smoothly.  But I got a great sale price on Photo Supreme and it seems to have worked on my tests.  Thank You very much for your help, unless you can see something I missed.  Thank You again for the infomation.

Thank You,

Sandy


----------

