Jeffrey’s “Metadata-Viewer Preset Editor” Lightroom Plugin

This plugin for Adobe Lightroom Classic allows you to create and edit tagset presets for Lightroom's metadata viewer. That is, it allows you to pick and choose which metadata items Lightroom should show for each photo, and in what order they should be shown.

To be clear: this plugin does not allow you to edit photo metadata itself.
It merely allows you to configure the list of items that Lightroom displays.

This plugin works in Lightroom Classic, and older versions as far back as Lightroom 3, though some features depend on the version of Lightroom.

The same download works for both Windows and Mac. See the box to the upper right for the download link (in orange) and installation instructions.

This plugin is an in-Lightroom version of the web-based preset editor that I published a couple of years ago. That application continues to work, but this plugin should prove to be more convenient. Also, this plugin incorporates the ability to include the custom metadata from other Lightroom plugins in your presets, a feature that I have not gotten around to update the online tool with.

This plugin is currently in beta release, without much documentation.

Mini Instructions

After installing it, you'll see a “Configure Metadata-View Presets” button in the Plugin Manager itself. Clicking on it will bring up the preset-edit dialog. Please see the “help” link in its upper-right corner.

Availability

I distribute this plugin as “donationware”. I provide it for free and it is mostly functional for the first six weeks. Until registered, it can not create “static custom presets”, nor import/export presets.

After the six-week trial period expires, custom presets remain usable, but with an ugly “unregistered” heading inserted at the top.

If registered, the “unregistered” heading goes away, of course, and also, the plugin gets the ability to create “static custom presets” that remain even if the plugin is removed, and it also gains the ability to import and export presets (so that you can move them from one computer to another, for example, or share with friends).

Registration is simple and costs the minimum 1 cent PayPal fee; any additional donation you'd like to make in encouragement or thanks is up to you. For details, see my blog post titled Lightroom Plugin Development: Now With Added Encouragement.

Version History
( Update Log via RSS )

20220328.111

Added "Preserved Filename".

Fixed double-click problem.

20220125.108

No longer aborts when a previously-added third-party plugin no longer exists.

20220120.107

Whack-a-mole with PayPal's random changes.

20211219.106

Warn when PayPal seems to have given a bogus code in the web-confirmation page.

20210518.105

For multi-line editable text fields, allow the user to select what hitting ENTER/return does (commit the text, or make a new line)

20210105.104

Allow metadata fields to be displayed using the full width of the metadata panel, with the label above or omitted altogether.

Fix up some issues with the new multi-line editable text fields.

20210104.103

Allow for multi-line captions (and other editable text fields). Once a field is selected, click on the "options" button; the multi-line aspect won't be presented in the preset-builder dialog, but it'll be there when the preset is actually selected in Lightroom.

Working around 'constant table overflow' error.

20201017.101

Updates for Lr10.

Worked around an "unknown key captureTime" error.

20200705.100

Try to make a bit more robust in the face of corrupt Lightroom preferences.

Work around a Windows bug related to canceling out of the registration dialog.

Added some extra debug logging to note whether the plugin is enabled.

20191003.99

Work around a Lightroom bug involving unreadable videos.

20190616.98

Fixed a "font size tiny" error.

20190607.97

Added the ability to filter items, to make finding things easier.

Work around a bug that sometimes causes plugins to be disabled when starting Lightroom via clicking on a catalog file.

Fix an "Unknown key: captureTime" crash.

20181017.96

Oops, forgot one of the fields in the Search Replace Transfer plugin.

20181016.95

Added fields for John Beardsworth's Search Replace Transfer plugin.

20181015.94

Updates for Lr8 (Lightroom Classic CC Version 8).

Try to work around a Lightroom bug related to photo timezones and how Lightroom handles accessing plugin data.

20181006.93

Added some extra debug logging.

20180907.92

Try to avoid having unexpectedly-long error messages create too-big a dialog.

20180610.91

Still more plugin-loader fiddling.

20180605.90

More fiddling with the plugin-loader stuff.

20180525.89

More debug logging.

20180524.88

The new "load fields from plugin" stuff I recently added, which entailed building a sort of Lightroom/plugin emulator, didn't work with certain plugins out there that did some fairly hairy things under the hood, that interacted with some Deep Magic in how Lightroom executes things. Finally figured it out!

Clicking on the version number in the Plugin Manager now copies version info to the clipboard

20180511.87

Reworked the "load fields from plugin" stuff to be much more robust. I more or less have to build a Lightroom emulator to load the plugin in and see what kind of custom fields it provides.

20171019.86

Updates for Lightroom 7

20170923.85

Update registration support to handle a stupid bug at PayPal that PayPal refuses to fix )-:

20170208.84

Added support for the "Temperature" field I just added to my geoencoding-support plugin.

Switch the log-sending mechanism to https.

20160821.83

Added support for Alloy Photo's Print Size Calculator plugin.

Highlight more that you can import fields from unrelated plugins.

Try to avoid yet another place where Lightroom gets hung because it can't handle certain kinds of dialogs at the same time.

20151222.82

Added the "At Facebook" item, which somehow got missed earlier.

20150809.81

Added two new items I found in Lightroom 6, "Camera + Lens" and "Camera + Lens Setting".

Added data for Lightroom-Plugins.com's Alamy Picture Manager.

20150209.80

Update the code that puts together the example value for the "Camera" metadata item, to mimic the grotesquely-verbose way that Lightroom actually does it itself.

20150206.79

In the POODLE-vunerability dialog, display a raw URL of a page on my site that discusses the issue, so that folks can be independently sure that the dialog is indeed from me and not malware.

20150125.78 Wasn't working on Lr2 again.
20141211.77

Added data for my Google Drive plugin, for my ipernity plugin, and for my Tumblr plugin.

Registration was broken on Lr2.

20141127.76 Added support for my Geoencoding-Support's "Timezone" metadata field.
20141019.75 Windows Only: Add a one-time check for the POODLE security vulnerability, and alert the user if it exists.
20140902.74 New build system
20140731.73 Registration fix for Lr5.6
20140729.72 Previous updates broke support on Lightroom 2
20140720.71 More Creative-Cloud support.
20140715.70

Fixed an issue with Creative-Cloud revalidation.

20140712.69

Lr5.5 and later Creative-Cloud installs can now revalidate themselves if needed.

20140710.68 Sigh, had a bug in the Creative-Cloud support.
20140708.67

Now supports Lr5.5+ Creative-Cloud Installs.

20140704.66 Sigh, introduced an error for some folks with the rebuild the other day.
20140630.65 Build-system update
20140422.64

Fixed a bug in the "smoother revalidation" stuff recently added.

20140418.63

Added a second form of the color-label item. Adobe seems to support two forms, one which is readonly but you can set a custom label, and one that you can edit but you can't set a custom label (and for whatever reason the standard label is included in the value column, so it looks oddly indented).

Make the revalidation process smoother, especially for folks using Lr5.4 and later.

Fixed some Windows dialog-layout bugs.

20131210.62 It seems the save-to-static-preset function had stopped working.
20131023.61 Fixed a bug that stopped the "Label" (color-label label) text from being changed.
20131010.60

Added new "Direction" field (direction of view) that seems to have appeared circa Lr5.

The "Supplier Image ID" entry was broken... would never actually be included in the preset.

20130908.59 Update default text for "Person Shown" to "Person Shown in Image" to match Lightroom
20130613.58 Better support for plugin revalidation.
20130611.57 Yet another Lr5 update
20130524.56 Apparently, a recent change broke things on Lr2, which some folks apparently still use.
20130501.55 Update for Lr5
20130412.54 Build system update.
20130328.53 Fix for the registration system.
20130209.52 More build-system maintenance
20130206.51 Tweak for my registration system
20130122.49

Note: you must restart Lightroom after installing this update.

Added support for my Creative Commons plugin.

Added support for Video and DNG metadata in Lr4.

Added a bunch of other new metadata fields I noticed in Lr4.

Updated the plugin's idea of Lightroom's builtin presets to match Lr4.

20120617.48 Add the ability to include custom metadata from any local plugin.
20120608.47 Fix an "attempt to perform arithmetic on field" error.
20120526.46

Update to handle the Mac App Store version of Lightroom.

Tweak for Lr4.1RC2.

Enhanced the send-log dialog to hopefully make reports more meaningful to me, yielding, I hope, the ability to respond more sensibly to more reports.

20120330.45 Update to handle 4.1RC
20120309.44 Had broken registrations in Lr2; Update to the debug logging to better track down timing issues that might arise.
20120304.43

More updates for Lr4.

20120221.42

More updates for Lr4.

20120207.41

More on the march toward Lr4, including upheaval in the code to handle Lightroom APIs being discontinued in Lr4.

Added data for a bunch of plugins.

Added some extra bulletproofing when reading preset files.

20120127.40

There's a bug in Lightroom that causes the whole plugin to fail for some users. This failure happens when the "build a preset" dialog tries to pull up example image data saved by other plugins (e.g. an export plugin's "Uploaded to..." flag).

This is just for the display of example image metadata while building a preset, and it'd be nice to show actual data, but not at the expense of crashing, so I've disabled it. The resulting preset, when used with Lightroom, of course does show all the data as appropriate to the preset you've built.... this bug is only related to how example metadata is shown in the builder dialog.

Also, removed registration-related restrictions from the Lr4 beta, since you can't register in a beta.

20120114.39 More tweaks for Lr4b
20120112.38

Update for Lr4 beta: explain in the plugin manager that the plugin can't be registered in the beta.

20111210.37

When doing a plugin upgrade, offer the ability to flush all the old copies of the plugin.

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.

20110910.36 Work around a bug that caused the plugin to crash in the Lr3.5 beta.
20110207.35 Was dorked in Lr2... now fixed.
20110110.34

More debugging to try to crack this tough dialog-won't-open bug. The best I can figure at this point is that it's a bug in Lightroom.

One workaround that just came to mind: before invoking the plugin manager, make sure that no photos are selected (e.g. that when in Loupe, "no photo selected" is shown, via control-D or command-D). That should, in theory, bypass the area of the dialog-creation code that's running into the bug. I can't reproduce the bug myself, so I can't test this workaround myself.

20110107.33 More debugging to try to crack this tough dialog-won't-open bug.
20101219.32 Added support for new IPTC in Lr3. Updated display for recent versions of my megapixel-sort plugin. Added yet more debugging to try to track down a missing-dialog problem some have been seeing.
20101209.30 Fixed an "ISO ISO" typo. Added a bunch of debug logging to try to track down a missing-dialog problem some have been seeing.
20100829.29 Made the revalidation process much simpler, doing away with the silly need for a revalidation file.
20100820.28 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.
20100712.27

Added support for my focal-length sort plugin.

20100625.26 Yikes, shaking out some more build issues.
20100624.25 Discovered a nasty build bug; pushing a new version in case it affects this plugin.
20100609.24

This version can be registered in Lightroom 3. It can run in Lightroom 2 or Lightroom 3; it does not work in the Lr3 betas.

It uses my new registration system when run on Lightroom 3, which avoids some of the silly issues of the old one. Please take care to note the details on the registration page: use of this version (or later) of the plugin in Lightroom 3 requires a new registration code, even if you had registered some older version of the plugin.

20100525.23 Turns out that "Metadata Date" is not available to the Lr3 beta, so the plugin wasn't working there. Made it always empty in the Lr3 beta preset-building screen.
20100520.22 Fixed the data used for the "Metadata Date" sample data in the preset-building dialog... I'd been showing the last-edit date by mistake.
20100516.21 Update for the Lr3 beta.
20100315.20

Completely changed how the one-click upgrade applies the newly-downloaded zip file, in the hopes that it'll work for more people. Rather than unzipping over the old copy, it now unzips to a temporary folder, then moves the old folder out of the way and the new folder into place. Prior versions' folders are now maintained (with the version number in the folder) in case you want to revert a version; you may want to clear them out from time to time. Of course, it won't take affect until you try to upgrade after having upgraded to or beyond this version.

20091205.19 Minor internal debugging tweaks.
20091027.18 Minor UI tidyup for OSX.
20091027.17 More LR3b fixes... actually seems to work now.
20091022.16 Added a first draft of some rudimentary support for Lightroom 3 Beta. See this important note about plugin support in Lightroom 3 Beta and Lightroom 3, including future plans for features and my registration system.
20090714.15

Enhanced the one-click upgrade stuff quite a bit, now detecting ahead of time when it will fail because the plugin is installed where Lightroom can't write (if Lightroom can't write to it, it can't update itself). I also added a progress bar, and now download in smaller chunks to avoid 'out of memory' errors on the larger plugins. Do remember that this new functionality becomes available after you upgrade to or past this version, when you then upgrade with it.

20090626.14 Added another new Video-Asset Management plugin field.
20090624.13 Added fields in support of my new Video-Asset Management plugin.
20090617.12 Added the new upload date/time fields for my other upload plugins (Zenfolio/SmugMug/Facebook/PicasaWeb).
20090603.11 Added support for the new "Flickr Upload Date" and "Upload Time" fields that I just added to my Flickr plugin.
20090601.10 Seems some Mac users were still losing presets each time... thought I tamed that bug, but indeed found another bug and fixed it. Hope this is the last one.
20090521.9 Fixed a "loadstring" error some users got.
20090511.8

This update affects Mac users only

It seems that many (all?) Mac users had problems with Lightroom forgetting presets each time it restarted. I've discovered a bug in Lightroom that I think I've been able to work around in this version, but the change is not backward compatible, so Mac users who were actually able to make Custom User Presets will lose them upon upgrade. Sorry. This happens only when upgrading from before this version to this version or after, and subsequent upgrades should be lossfree. (Static User Presets, and all presets on Windows, are unaffected and should carry through unharmed.)

20090510.7 Added a link in the Plugin Manager to the plugin's update-log RSS feed.
20090428.6 Added custom metadata from my Megapixel Sort plugin.
20090426.5 Added a bunch of debugging stuff to try to track down why presets are not saved for a few users.
20090425.4 Oops, the one-button upgrade stuff didn't work due to a typo on my part, sorry. Upgrading to this version will still need to be manual, but upgrading from this version to whatever's next will hopefully work.
20090423.3 Fixed "ID_PREFIX" bug that popped up when converting a custom prefix to static.
20090420.2

Wow, this plugin continues to be one of the most complex I've ever worked on. Tons of new stuff this time, including...

  • Now donationware.
  • Lots of UI cleanup.
  • Added "label" and "separator" links at the bottom, so that you can easily add labels and separator lines without scrolling to those entries at the bottom of the right-side master list.
  • Added a "show photo data from" toggle in the bottom-right corner, allowing you to toggle between photo data from the image selected when you invoked the dialog, or fully-filled-out fake sample data. (If no images are selected when you invoke the dialog, you get only the fake sample data.)
  • If you click on the active line in the left-side preset preview, the associated item in the right-side master list is scrolled into view and highlighted.
  • Some have been confused by how a new preset's title is entered, so I've added a bunch of visual hints (big flashing "EDIT HERE!!!" signs 🙂 ) until I can figure a more intuitive interface.
  • The "Blank Slate" built-in preset didn't really work. Does now, and has been renamed to "Empty (No Items)"
  • Added the ability to edit/save/create static user presets, and to import/export presets. I've left these as candy for when the plugin is registered.
  • Added a help page describing the different types of presets the plugin works with (Lightroom default, Plugin default, User custom, and Static user custom).
  • Added the "map" metadata item from my geoencoding plugin
  • Lots more I can't remember.

One of the big todos is to add the ability to set attributes to items, such as the the number of lines of a caption.

20090330.1

Initial public beta release.

The UI for this plugin has been by far the most difficult to do, and that's mostly what this plugin is about: a snazzy interface for editing a simple preset file. Lightroom's plugin infrastructure is still in its infancy and understandably Adobe has not yet filled out every feature required to make a rich, interactive presentation. Taking it almost as a personal challenge, I've expended enormous effort to try to work around some of the limitations. This is the best I can do for now.

At this first-beta-release stage, I'd appreciate comments via email, so I've turned off comment-submission for this post.

Because this is an early beta that I don't want to hang around very long, the plugin expires after a month. It'll certainly be updated well before then.


The 30 most-recent comments (out of 102; see all), most recent last...

Hi Jeffrey,

Further to Matthew Swift’s comment above regarding custom fields from jb Search Replace Transfer, I can see his fixed custom fields in the metadata preset builder, but the user fields are not showing up, Custom 01, etc.

Just wondering whether I did the import fields from plugin correctly? I think I’m supposed to highlight the plugin folder and click on Choose Selected?

Thanks, Mike.

You’re doing it correctly… it just turns out that the way the plugin builds its list of fields makes it such that it can’t be imported properly. I’ve gone ahead and added native support for that plugin to this one, so there’s no need to import… just update to the latest version and all the fields should be there. —Jeffrey

— comment by Mike West on October 15th, 2018 at 7:00am JST (6 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you very much for the native support for JB’s search/replace/transfer plugin! “Custom 04” field is not showing up, however — I’ll guess this was an accidental omission on your part, because all the others are there.

Yeah, sorry about that… it’s fixed now. —Jeffrey

— comment by Matthew Swift on October 16th, 2018 at 10:17pm JST (6 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Thanks for adding those custom fields. Unfortunately, custom 04 is missing which happens to be one I used.

Regards, Mike.

Doh! Sorry. I typed too fast, I guess. I’ve just pushed out a fix. —Jeffrey

— comment by Mike West on October 17th, 2018 at 7:54am JST (6 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
for a long time now I have been using your Metadata-builder plugin with LR. (also have donated….) no, with the latest version 8.0 LR tells me the Plugin won’t work anymore. And, unfortunately, it doesn’t!

Any suggestion what I could do?LR does provide Metadata for IPTC but it doesn’t allow me to change the order they way I can put things together with yr App.
Can you help?

thanks and kind regards
Christian

I updated all the plugins for Lr8 within 60 seconds of it being announced. If you’re using the latest version but Lightroom is not liking it, please send a screenshot. —Jeffrey

— comment by christian fuerst on October 18th, 2018 at 9:35pm JST (6 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey. I noticed that that my template is not being remembered as the default to open when I start LR like it used to. It defaults back to the “Defaults”. I erased my Preferences file and created a new one, but that didn’t help. Any ideas?

Thanks!
It definitely sounds like your preferences have become corrupt. On OSX you can’t just delete the file anymore… you have to do this to really take care of it. —Jeffrey

— comment by Monte Trumbull on October 23rd, 2018 at 8:53am JST (6 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey, I am using your Metadata Viewer Preset Editor and love it. My only issue is that it is not “sticky” – I have to select it each time I open LR. Have I done something wrong with my installation? All the other standard presets are sticking, but not the ones I create with your Preset Editor.

Rex Harris
Queensland Australia

It should definitely be sticky, so I worry that your Lr preferences file is going corrupt. See this FAQ for info about resetting your preferences file. —Jeffrey

— comment by Rex Harris on November 5th, 2018 at 2:51pm JST (6 years, 1 month ago) comment permalink

Another plugin from the one and only god of LR plugins 🙂

I was annoyed of LR’s limited metadata possibilities for some time now and just planned to build something myself. But fortunately you already gave us a nice solution to customize the metadata panel.

Adobe really should consider hiring you, so that Lightroom could finally get all the productivity features it needs.

Thanks yet again.

— comment by Roberto Seidel on February 9th, 2019 at 10:57pm JST (5 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

Finally started using this and it is a time saver indeed.

One suggestion: implement a filter for the available fields (an input box where one can type to restrict the list of items available), as scrolling through the very large list is a bit cumbersome.

Thanks!

Yeah, I’ve been meaning to do that for years. Just added it. Thanks for the prod. —Jeffrey

— comment by Iustin Pop on June 5th, 2019 at 9:54pm JST (5 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Hi, I am from Townsville, North Queensland in Australia.

Is there a similar Plug in available for use in Photoshop CC thanks. I would like to be able to add my photograph file number to shots when I load them on FB. Thanks.

Cheers.

Outback Tracks.

I don’t know anything about plugins available for Photoshop, but I had the impression that Photoshop itself had a full metadata editor. Perhaps that’s just Bridge? In any case, my stuff is Lightroom only, sorry. —Jeffrey

— comment by Brian on June 30th, 2019 at 11:37am JST (5 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Great Plug-in!

Using it along with the Alamy Lightroom-Bridge plug-in. The only problem is while making a preset there are a number of fields such as category that are not available. Any way to add more of those fields?

“Category” is there. As far as I know, all fields that Lightroom allows are available in the plugin. —Jeffrey

— comment by Don on September 17th, 2019 at 9:54pm JST (5 years, 3 months ago) comment permalink

Hey, love the plugin, been using it for years. Is there a way to add a “VR status” field to the list (on/off)?

I can’t seem to find it even in the “Metadata Viewer”, although, that wouldn’t be much help, as I really need to tell whether VR was on or off right then and there, w/o pulling up all of the EXIF data.

*I shoot with a Nikon D850 and D800.

Thanks!

This plugin can configure only fields available in Lightroom. If another plugin creates some kind of “VR status” field, or you somehow populate a standard field with VR-related data, you can use this plugin to make sure that field is visible. If this “VR status” data is easily found in the metadata of the original image file, you might use my Data Explorer plugin to partition the images to their different buckets, then assign a value to a standard field. You can also use my Bag-o-Goodies plugin to write directly to certain fields. —Jeffrey

— comment by Registered user on November 28th, 2019 at 7:39am JST (5 years ago) comment permalink

I am a registered user of this plugin, and it has been working perfectly before. However, Adobe just released the latest version of Lightroom today (Lightroom Classic 9.0), and during installation I received a warning message, which says “the version of the Jeffrey’s Metadata Preset Builder plugin you have does not work in Lr9”.

Please update to the latest version of the plugin. —Jeffrey

— comment by Feng Wei on December 11th, 2019 at 9:45am JST (5 years ago) comment permalink

Feature request: Aspect Ratio, a calculated field expressed to two decimal places equal to the image width in pixels divided by the image height in pixels. I know I can sort by Aspect Ratio, use another plugin to partition images into collections by aspect ratio, use the Crop tool to previsualize an aspect ratio against the image, but most of the time, I just want to see the number for an individual image. Extension: option to express (or better, suffix) a fixed list of common ratios as a ratio of integers , e.g., “1.25 = 5:4”, “1.34 = 4:3”, “1.5 = 3:2”, “1.6 = 16:10”, “1.78 = 16:9”.

Unfortunately, the plugin can’t create new fields…. it merely lets you choose which fields to see, in what order. —Jeffrey

— comment by Matthew Swift on March 19th, 2020 at 4:44am JST (4 years, 9 months ago) comment permalink

My Motherboard crashed and I had to buy a new PC. I have one saved preset I would like to have access to. However I did not export it. Are the presets saved as a copiable file?

They’re stored either in Lightroom’s preferences, or as a static preset file in Lightroom’s app-data folder. —Jeffrey

— comment by Colin on May 31st, 2020 at 5:00am JST (4 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Every time I restart LR, the Metadata panel on display has been reset to Default, instead of my nice shiny new one created using your Metadata Preset Builder. How do I make my new one the one always used.

Thanks

If Lightroom is not remembering your selection across restarts, I’d worry that Your LR preferences have started to corrupt. If other settings are starting to go bad, or weird things start to happen, look to reset your preferences. In any case, though, if you convert your preset to a static one, I’d think it would be remembered regardless…. if not, then your preferences are really truly corrupted. —Jeffrey

— comment by Colin on June 1st, 2020 at 10:50pm JST (4 years, 6 months ago) comment permalink

Thank you for maintaining these wonderful plugins for newer version of LrClassic!

I’m experiencing the following issue when trying to enable the metadata-viewer plugin:

**** Error 1

An error occurred while attempting to run one of the plug-in’s scripts.
No script by the name onEnable.lua

You might need to restart Lightroom after the plugin upgrade. (A Lightroom restart is not normally required after a plugin upgrade, but if the upgrade results in new plugin files, then Lightroom won’t see them until after a restart.) —Jeffrey

— comment by Mike Wren on October 22nd, 2020 at 11:33am JST (4 years, 2 months ago) comment permalink

Hello Jeff,

After upgrading to LR v10, I’ve downloaded the update of your Metadata Viewer Preset editor.

Bad news is that the preset I have meticulously built before in LR 9 with your older Plugin has disappeared I think this is due to Over-writing preference at Startup (LR was hanging at startup).

I see that in your plugin we can import a preset from a file. What file extension would that be? Is there a chance my previous preset is saved somewhere?

Thanks

A “static preset” would have been saved as a file in your local account “Application Support” area (or whatever it’s called on Windows), and would be there as a viewer preset when you launched Lightroom. If it hadn’t been saved as a static preset, it would have been deleted when your preferences were flushed. (The file would be an “*.lrtemplate” file, which Lightroom uses for various kinds of preset files.) —Jeffrey

— comment by Alexandre on November 22nd, 2020 at 2:38am JST (4 years ago) comment permalink

Jeffrey – love your plug-ins! I would like to expand the size of the ‘Caption’ field in my Metadata preset, but see no way to do so. I searched this forum and your FAQ and see no specific instructions, though there are hints. Am I overlooking a setting?

David Kotz
Lyme, New Hampshire

You’re not missing anything… I haven’t yet been able to make that configurable. You can do it by hand, though, by saving your preset as a “static preset” to create a “*.lrtemplate” file on disk, then edit the file with a plain-text editor (not a word processor). You’ll find a line for the caption that looks like "com.adobe.caption",. Replace that line, quotes and all, with:

{ formatter = "com.adobe.caption", label = "Caption", height_in_lines = 7, allow_newlines = true, topLabel = true },

Take care to use “dumb” quotes, and don’t forget the comma at the end. You can of course choose the height you want, and can try with topLabel=false as well, to see what style you like.

You have to restart Lightroom for any change in the template file to take effect.—Jeffrey

— comment by David Kotz on December 29th, 2020 at 11:16pm JST (3 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

HI,
Love the preset plug in, and just sent you a Paypal donation of $28.88 by Paypal.

The one thing I would like to add to my preset is the Large Caption field, but I don’t think I could find it when I set the preset up. Can it be added?

Happy New Year from La Jolla, California.

(Thanks for your kind gift!)
You’re the second person to ask for that this week, so sure, I just added it. When a field is selected (when it’s got the red triangle), a new “options” button appears below, letting you choose the height in lines and whether you want a wide field or normal field. —Jeffrey

— comment by Rachel on January 1st, 2021 at 12:24pm JST (3 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeff,
I really like the plugin (was looking for exactly something like that). But unfortunately, after saving and applying the preset, always only the first five fields are shown. Is this a limit of the unregistered version?
Thanks and regards

There should be no such restriction. Can you send some screenshots to illustrate what you’re running into? jfriedl@yahoo.com —Jeffrey

— comment by Dirk on January 19th, 2021 at 5:59am JST (3 years, 11 months ago) comment permalink

I have set up a custom metadata preset in Lightroom Classic and select it in the Library Module. But every time I exit LRC (with backup) and reopen LRC, it goes back to the Default Metadata list.

Is there some way for LRC to use the last Metadata preset that I selected before exiting when I re-open?

Do you perhaps have the plugin set to reload with each use? (in the “Plugin Author Tools” in the bottom right of the plugin manager). Also, if you convert it to a static preset (one of the options in the plugin if the plugin has been registered), it will certainly not reset. —Jeffrey

— comment by Virginia Prevosto on February 1st, 2021 at 8:54am JST (3 years, 10 months ago) comment permalink

I think my question is a little different from Virginia Prevosto. I tried with and without “Reload Plug-in”, but the metadata TEMPLATE is never kept across LRC reloads. LRC always starts with “default” and I have to re-select the template I made with your plugin.

— comment by Dennis Foreman on March 30th, 2021 at 12:29am JST (3 years, 8 months ago) comment permalink

I am completely ignorant about editing the metadata, but learnt about you programme from Victoria Bampton’s book. I have many picture in lightroom which were captured without a digital camera, or from scanning negatives.My first order of business is to modify the exim data so that the year in which the photo was taken is recorded. I do not know where that is located and how to batch file the information . Could you please give me a reference to where I can learn to do this in batches.. I assume that it is necessary to use your software for this purpose
Thanks
Terence USA

This plugin has nothing to do with what you want to do. This plugin is merely for selecting which metadata fields you want to see in Library’s metadata panel. You can set the data of the photos by, in that metadata panel, clicking on the icon to the right of the “Capture Time”. If the images didn’t have capture-time metadata, it’ll be the date/time that you imported into Lightroom. Clicking on the icon to the right of “Capture Time” brings up a dialog that allows you to set/edit the date and time associated with an image. (You can’t set just the year.) If you select multiple images prior to clicking on that icon, you’ll set/edit the date/time for those multiple images. —Jeffrey

— comment by terence on May 1st, 2021 at 3:51pm JST (3 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

I just updated from a 2019 version and discovered the new possibility to set a minimum line height for some fields. I use this for the caption field.
Unfortunately, if I do so, I cannot end the editing of this fileds with ENTER or Ctrl+ENTER or something like that.

I guess this limitation is based on some Lightroom internals. In case its not: For faster and easier editing it would be helpful if one don’t has to click somewhere to finish the editing.

You can always tap TAB to exit the field (moving focus to the next field). Also, I just pushed out a new version of the plugin that lets you choose what happens with the ENTER key: it commits the text, ending the edit, or inserts a new line. If you choose the former, you can still rely on Control-Return (MacOS) or Alt-ENTER (Win) to insert a new line. —Jeffrey

— comment by Roberto on May 14th, 2021 at 9:14pm JST (3 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I have purchased this and several of your other Lightroom plug-ins, which have been so useful in my work. Thanks for all the terrific work you do for the Lightroom community. This plugin is the lastest one that I have purchased.

Previously, I had used the Adobe SDK to wrote my own template for a custom Metadata field list, and that was working fine except that I wanted to be able to include the “User Comment” field, which apparently the SDK does not allow. I called this set that IO programmed with the SDK “Alison custom”, and placed it in (Windows) folder
C:\Users\alipa\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Metadata Field Lists
It works fine.

I then used this plugin of yours to add “User Comment” to the list, and now there is a list called “Alison custom2” which has that and shows everything that I want. There is one issue, though, that I would love to fix. If I am using the “Alison custom” list, then close Lightroom, when I reopen Lightroom the same list is there. That is, it is “sticky.” However, if I am using the “Alison custom2” list that I made with this plugin, then close Lightroom, when I reopen it the Metadata list reverts to the Lightroom “Default” list. Presumably this is because this is not an .lrtemplate file in the folder listed above. Is there any way to use my new “Alison custom2” list that I made with this plugin and have it “stick” when I close and then reopen Lightroom?

Thank you.

— comment by Alison K Pollack on July 7th, 2021 at 1:14am JST (3 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hi again,

OK, I figured it out. After I wrote my comment I saw the other comments, and read through them. There I found my answer — I had not set the preset to “static” after I registered. Problem solved!

Thank you again for all your terrific work, that you keep doing and updating!!!!! Love your plugins!

Alison

— comment by Alison K Pollack on July 7th, 2021 at 1:30am JST (3 years, 5 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

Thank you so much for all the amazing work you are doing.

I would have a question: I use your Metadata Viewer and Metadata Presents plug-ins and the Viewer has some metadata (e.g. camera specific ones) which I would like to see in the right tab by invoking them through the Presents plug-in.
For some reason I’m not able to find them. Also when I push ‘import fields from plugin’ I get an error.

It is at all possible to see most/all the fields from the Viewer in the Presets plug-in?

Thanks.

Regards,
frank

The list of fields that Lightroom allows to be displayed in the metadata panel is limited to what you see in the Presets plugin, or specific fields that other plugins might add/support. This is a small subset of all the possible fields that images formats support. The “Metadata Viewer” plugin looks into each master image, without regard to Lightroom’s limitations, and presents what it finds. —Jeffrey

— comment by Frank on December 11th, 2021 at 11:45pm JST (3 years ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,

I have a couple of small problems with your wonderful plug-in.

1. Several months (a year?) ago, it lost it’s registration status, and I haven’t been able to fix that. What I did recently do is download the new version, and so I am in the count-down phase (again). Is there a way to fix this? Actually I love it enough to make another donation – so either way works!

2. I have created a fairly elaborate template, but the Metadata keeps randomly switching back to Default. I haven’t been able to pin down what triggers that, but it is quite frequent – several times within one editting session. Any suggestions? My template DOES appear when I reboot Lightroom Classic (11.3.1, Mac OS), so I’m guessing preferences isn’t the problem.

Thanks again from La Jolla,
Rachel

Registration status is lost when there’s a major upgrade (e.g. from Lr10 to Lr11). A new registration code fixes it, and can be generated with a $.01 transaction, if you like. About item number two, make sure that all plugins you’ve got installed are NOT set to reload upon each export (see the bottom-right section of the plugin manager). That option is for plugin developers, so normal users should never have it enabled. A side effect of reloading plugins sometimes causes the reset to Default, so that’s why I’m guessing it might be that option is enabled for one or more of your plugins. —Jeffrey

— comment by Rachel Y on May 11th, 2022 at 4:02am JST (2 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeff,
Thanks for your reply above. I’ve checked and none of the plugins are set to reload upon each export (truly, I did read the warning not to when I first installed:) ).
But the problem persists, is there any other kind of observation I should be doing? For the life of me I can’s see a pattern, but when I’m working, it seems to be well under 5 minutes before it flips back to default.
Thanks,
Rachel

There are two ways that a metadata preset can be hooked into Lightroom. The main way is for the plugin to tell Lightroom, and the other is via a static file in a specific Lightroom folder. The former is what I’ve seen get deselected, so maybe convert the preset to a static preset with the plugin, then restart Lightroom and select it that way. Be sure to keep fingers crossed the whole time. /-: —Jeffrey

— comment by Rachel Y on May 20th, 2022 at 5:20am JST (2 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink

Hi Jeffrey,
Converting to a static preset did the trick, thanks very much. It’s a great plug-in for my purposes – I need lots of fields for cataloging old photos where keywords just weren’t doing it for me.
I paid up again, figuring you’d get the ‘good feels’ for the number, living in 日本 and all.
Rachel
La Jolla, CA

— comment by RCL Rachel on May 24th, 2022 at 10:54am JST (2 years, 7 months ago) comment permalink
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