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This plugin for Adobe Lightroom allows you to easily view the metadata in the master image file of a photo or video in Lightroom's catalog. It's not as pretty or convenient as the metadata display on the right-side panel in Library, but it shows all the data in the master image, so is perhaps at times useful.
This plugin works in Lightroom 4, Lightroom 3, and Lightroom 2. (Though for Lightroom 3, you must have at least version 3.5)
The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link link (in orange) and installation instructions.
Note: a Lightroom major upgrade, such as from Lr3 to Lr4, de-registers the plugin in the upgraded version, thus requiring a new (1-cent if you like) registration code in the upgraded version. It makes for a hassle every couple of years, I know. Sorry. See this note for details.
Installation
First, download the plugin using the link in the upper-right corner of this page, and unzip it to a location on disk where you'll keep it.
Then follow the normal Lightroom plugin install instructions to install and enable the plugin in your copy of Lightroom.
Using
With a photo selected, invoke
and a dialog will pop up listing all metadata that can be found in the image.
The plugin uses Phil Harvey's amazing ExifTool library under the hood. It's very good at gleaning metadata from an image file, and increasingly so for video files. It's the same library I use for my Online Image Metadata Viewer, though that web-based viewer does much more work to present the data in an informative fashion. Such efforts are not needed here because the most interesting data can already be shown in the Metadata Viewer panel on the right side of the Library Module (and you can use my Metadata-Viewer Preset Editor plugin to configure just what you want to see).
The only reason to use this plugin at all is to see data that Lightroom doesn't expose. There can be plenty of it, though the amount differs greatly depending on the image source and its processing prior to arriving in Lightroom.
As you can see at right, the metadata is just dumped out in tabular form. You can mouseover each item to see more details about what section of the metadata it was found.
There's ample opportunity to enhance how the data is shown, but I'll wait to see how popular the plugin becomes before I spend much effort on the frills.
Keyboard Shortcut
Windows users of Lightroom 3 or later can use ALT-F S M to bring up the viewer on the selected image. Windows users of Lightroom 2 can do the same after doing the setup described on this page.
Mac users can create any keyboard shortcut they like in the system Keyboard Preferences. I use Command-M. With Lightroom 2, the “Menu Title” is “View Master Image Metadata”, but in Lightroom 3 and later you have to add three spaces at the beginning, to account for the three spaces that Lightroom adds for the indentation in the menu. Thus, on Lightroom 3 and later, you would use “◊◊◊View◊Master◊Image◊Metadata” (where ◊ represents a space).
Availability
This plugin is distributed as “donationware”. I have chosen to make it available for free — everyone can use it forever, without cost of any kind — but unless registered, its functionality is somewhat reduced after six weeks. Registration is done via PayPal, and if you choose to register, it costs the minimum 1-cent PayPal fee; any amount you'd like to add beyond PayPal's sliding fees as a gift to me is completely optional, and completely appreciated. For details, see my blog post titled Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement. If you're interested in how I picked up a plugin-development hobby like this, see My Long Path To Lightroom Plugin Development.
Note: Registrations in Lightroom 2 do not carry forward to Lightroom 3.
As I mentioned above, this plugin relies heavily on the ExifTool
library, so I have decided to pass along half of any gifts related to this
plugin to the ExifTool library's author. If you choose to send a gift when
you register, it'll be handled automatically, but if you send a gift any
other time (they're always welcome 
), please let me know so I can
share your kindness with Phil. In either case, a big thanks from Phil, too.
Version History
(
Update Log via RSS
)
| 20120330.16 | Update to handle 4.1RC |
| 20120309.15 | Had broken registrations in Lr2; Update to the debug logging to better track down timing issues that might arise. |
| 20120304.14 |
More on the march toward Lr4, including upheaval in the code to handle Lightroom APIs being discontinued in Lr4. |
| 20120114.13 | More tweaks for Lr4b |
| 20120112.12 |
Update for Lr4 beta: explain in the plugin manager that the plugin can't be registered in the beta. Updated Image::ExifTool to version 8.75. |
| 20111210.11 |
Had issues with the registration button sometimes not showing. Added a system-clock check and reports to the user if the system clock is more than a minute out of date. An incorrect system clock can cause problems with various kinds of communication and authentication with some of my plugins, so I've just gone ahead and added this to every plugin. |
| 20111030.10 |
Updated Image::ExifTool to version 8.68 When doing a plugin upgrade, offer the ability to flush all the old copies of the plugin. |
| 20110329.9 |
Consider metadata to be encoded as UTU-8 for display.
Upgraded to the embedded copy of ExifTool to version 8.50. |
| 20100829.8 | Made the revalidation process much simpler, doing away with the silly need for a revalidation file. |
| 20100820.7 | Discovered a bug in my plugin build system that caused horribly difficult-to-track-down errors in one plugin, so am pushing out rebuilt versions of all plugins just in case. |
| 20100719.6 |
Added a search filter. Unfortunately, despite spending way too many hours trying, I couldn't figure out how to make the display scroll to the top when filtering, so if there are fewer results than fill up to the point you happen to have scrolled into view, nothing will be shown, making it look like there are no matching lines, rather than the reality that whatever matching lines are simply not scrolled into the current view. So take care to scroll to the top if the display looks empty. Upgraded the underlying ExifTool to version 8.25. |
| 20100626.5 | Was sorting the display on the wrong thing. Doh! |
| 20100625.4 | Yikes, shaking out some more build issues. |
| 20100624.3 | Discovered a nasty build bug; pushing a new version in case it affects this plugin. |
| 20100623.2 | Found a boo-boo right away. |
| 20100623.1 | Initial public release |
Very slow – 40 seconds to display the metadata.
It takes about a second to compute the data and build the display for simple JPGs on my system, maybe three seconds for large, complex raw files for my D700. If you have something that takes a long time, it’s a reflection on either the complexity of the file or the underpoweredness of your system. Or a bug. If you think it might be the latter, I’d appreciate it if you could send an example image, and info on your system. —Jeffrey
Flash exposure compensation appear with a wrong alphebetical order. Bug ???
Betwween Compression and Continuous drive.
It was more easy to find with other flash info.
Andre
Province of Quebec (Canada)
It comes out right in my tests. Could you email a sample image? —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey, Thanks for a great plugin. Installed Ok, but I can’t seem to be able to ‘enable’ the plugin. Button works, but doesn’t stick. What am I doicng wrong?
It’s probably disabling due to some error with the plugin (see the bottom-right section of the plugin manager). That almost certainly means a bad unzip, though if it comes immediately after upgrading the plugin it might mean that you just need to restart Lightroom). If you’re getting it with a fresh download/unzip, try downloading/unzipping with different browser/tools… —Jeffrey
Great plugin Jeffrey! I’ve been a fan of PhotoMe, an external standalone program, but this is really convenient within Lightroom. If you decide to continue to develop this plugin it would be a great addition if you could group settings together by source (exif, maker notes, etc) or allow to choose sort by source (and then alpha within source) or just alpha as it is now.
-stu-
This is a great plug-in! The one thing I was hoping to find is the camera actuation? Did I miss it? Is it available in the metadata?
Depends on the camera. Most don’t have it, some do. —Jeffrey
Jeffrey, this is just plain awesome — it’ll be a big time saver for me, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it earlier.
Just to say thanks for this plugin, I have had a few issues with rouge keywords in some images for a while, now I know where they are coming from. My only frustration now is getting rid of them! I may not use this plugin every day but it will certainly prove its worth on occasions.
Neil
I always get this error:
Using LR3, I tried x32 and x64 bit modes on OSX10.6.4
bad argument #1 to ‘gsub’ (string expected, got function)
Plugin version? If you get it in the latest version, I’d appreciate a log —Jeffrey
Great plugin. If only one could access these fields as tokens when exporting/publishing photos. I used to use LR/Transporter to import formatted shooting info into a scene field in LR. Sadly LR/Transporter stopped working for me since LR2.7 upgrade. Any chance of having the data displayed in this plugin accessible as tokens?
It’s not straightforward to get this stuff into Lightroom, so probably not going to happen any time soon. However, I’m surprised about LR/Transporter…. Tim keeps that up to date; if it’s not working for you, you might drop him a note. —Jeffrey
Hi Jeffrey
There is plenty of valuable data here, well done.
Problem I am having is that it is almost overwhelming and some of it is hard to interpret; could I suggest that there are more detailed explanations of the terms (via a bubble or pop up window?) in situ? as this listing of tags is also detailed but not easy / quick to interrogate.
Also how about ensuring there are accompanying units next to all types of “measurement”
hope this helps
ed
Awesome – just another plugin that will likely become a valuable part of my workflow, thanks!
Was on a shoot last night and for some reason my thumbnail preview was just totally different from a colleagues. I performed a reset of all camera settings and the thumbnails it kicked out were as expected. Interested in seeing what the differences were, so will be using this plugin to make comparisons.
To that end – is there a way I could export just this table set as something like a CSV so I can do a side-by-side comparison with another image shot after the camera was re-set?
The easiest way would be to download the command-line version of exiftool. —Jeffrey
Is there a way to view whether Image Stabili(s)zation was turned off or on for any given image, with a Canon 40D and a Canon EF70-200 IS USM Lens. The plug-in appears to display everything but that. Have I missed something?
Excellent tool by the way
It displays everything it knows about. If it’s not showing up, either the stabilization status is not stored in the Exif, or ExifTool doesn’t know how to interpret it if it’s there. —Jeffrey
Odd – because according to the ExifTool web site – the stablization tag should be present for Canon. At least that’s my interpretation. It’s not the most user friendly site to try and work out so maybe I’ve misunderstood!
I’m sure it depends on the camera. —Jeffrey
Exactlly what I was looking for, except for one thing: it would be great if you could display side by side what is in the file and what is in the LR database (And even better : highlight the metadata differences). That way when a file is displayed as having been changed externally, I will know if I need to read the new metadata in lightroom or overwrite them with lightroom record. Regards Eric
That’s a great idea, but it’s not that straightforward. Some things are indeed straightfoward (e.g. caption), but Lightroom derives some items from camera-proprietary fields, and some fields are not updated even when re-read, so to do a proper job would take some extensive research and testing. I’ll keep it in mind, but the bang-for-the-buck is not worth it at the moment. —Jeffrey
Bug, feature, or just me.
On the Metadata display panel, when I use the scroll wheel on the mouse I get two different speeds of scroll, depending on where the mouse pointer is: 1) if pointer is on border of panel, get normal scroll, about 1 page per click, (or about 7 clicks for the full length scroll) or 2) if pointer is in “Image Data” area, one click takes me down to the middle of the EXIF data, or 2 clicks to near the bottom of all the data. Appears to be a difference between the panel border and the area the data goes in.
This is Win 7, LR3.5, Nikon d300s, Logitech mouse.
Thanks for all the excellent plug-ins! I use several of them.
George
It’s probably a bug in Lightroom, but since I’m using an unsupported feature of the plugin infrastructure to make the scrooling area, it’s not really something I can complain about. So, let’s consider it a feature.
—Jeffrey
This is a great plug in. It is giving me exactly the data I was looking for. I just started using a Fuji camera that has some settings for dynamic range, signal/noise etc. and these are not shown in Lightroom exif data.
Many thanks!
Terry
I have tested your plugin and I am a bit overwhelmed – but all I was looking for was shown -that is great. I could find datas, that otherwise I find only in View NX from Nikon. I there a way to adjust or configurate what is shown and what is not of interesst for me (like in Adobe Bridge)? Could be, that then it works even faster.
Thank you for your work
Enrico (Switzerland)
You can use the filter at the top to search for stuff, but otherwise there’s nothing to configure a set of items, sorry. —Jeffrey
Do you know of a way that lightroom can sort images based on one of the makernotes fields? In particular, I would love to auto-apply a ‘Camera Correction profile’ to match the Creative Style/Picture Style/Picture Control.
I don’t know of any way to do this in Lightroom. If you have a lot of photos, it might make sense to use ExifTool to extract the info, then use LrTransporter to get it into a field that Lightroom can filter on, then use that to group photos for camera profiles. —Jeffrey
Hello Jeffrey,
first of all thank you for providing those great plugins.
Just downloaded the metadata viewer. I was wonderering why is the scrollbar on the left side. Usually one is looking for scrollbars on the right side of a window.
Thanks
Klaus
I dunno, that’s just how Lightroom does it. —Jeffrey
Hello Jeffrey.
Extremely satisfied with your metadata viewer through Lightroom4
Can you make a perfect Metadata extractor for Video clips. Seems to work already, but there must be more information.
Thanks
Vagn-Ebbe
The hard work under the hood of recognizing and extracting metadata is done by Phil Harvy’s ExifTool library. He works tirelessly (and mostly thanklessly) on it; perhaps send a word of thanks and encouragement his way, and if you have any specific knowledge how to extract something he’s missing, please let him know. —Jeffrey