Post Production Tips
How to Use XMP Files to Transfer Develop Settings Between Applications and Computers in Lightroom 3
(The Lightroom video tutorial in this post is just under the introductory text below. The working files for this video can be found in any of the articles within the Creating Catalogs and Importing Chapter)
XMP Files are extremely useful. Because RAW files are so large, it is rather cumbersome transferring them back and forth between computers, or individuals. While RAW images can be anywhere from 10 – 30 Megabytes, XMP files are only around 10 Kilobytes. So, they are extremely easy to share and transfer.
So, if two computers or individuals have all the same RAW files, then develop settings can be passed back and forth by simply sharing the XMP Sidecar Files.
In this video, we are going to talk through some of these practical uses for XMP, as well as show you how to save and pass them back and forth so that you can know how to use XMP Sidecar Files whenever it is necessary to aid your workflow.
Enjoy!
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Post Production Pye
SLR Lounge Senior Editor
Partner ofLin and Jirsa Photography
Nice tutorial
Hi!
Can you explain to me why between two computers, the sidecar files aren’t showing the differences that one of us have made already?
Pye thanks for this it was was very helpful. I wanted to do something slightly different than what you describe in the video, but it definitely got me where I needed to be.
We did a photo walk at lunch one day and everyone wanted to see each others photos as soon as we got back to work, so I developed mine on my workstation at work. Later that day when I imported the images into my catalog at home I wanted the processing I did at work to be transferred to my home catalog. A quick google search brought me here. :)
I transferred the XMP files into the folder with my photos at home, then I removed the photos from the catalog (Alt-Backspace) then simply imported them back in to the catalog using the Add option. They came back into the same folder with the develop settings that were transferred. I didn’t have to deal with moving or copying any image files at all.
I’m definitely going to make time to check out the rest of the tutorials and I’m going to point some of my Lightroom enabled friends to the slrloung training library as well!
Thanks again!
Mike