Where Lightroom plug-in custom metadata is stored and whether it can be edited externally

Question

I use Jeffrey Friedl’s Lightroom plug-in to upload photos to Zenfolio. The plug-in adds custom metadata fields such as an uploaded yes/no flag and a URL field, but they are not editable in Lightroom.

I’d like to know:
- where Lightroom stores plug-in-added metadata,
- whether there is any external tool that can edit those values directly, and
- whether changing that metadata outside Lightroom could cause problems when Lightroom reads it again.

user20973 · Answer

1) Adobe has support for plug-ins to add their own metadata this data is stored in the lightroom catalog. From the SDK doc "Values stored in custom metadata fields are stored only in Lightroom's database. In the current release, a plug-in cannot link custom metadata fields to XMP values or save them with the image file. "

2) No. However you might be able to edit it in LR. They have a concept of custom meta data that is private and public. One possible tool to use to examine if you can see the data you want is another one of Jeffery's plug-ins: http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/metadata-viewer

3) Not berserk but possibly confused - and even stomp on your externally changed values. If you do make changes from an external tool there is a command to update the LR catalog from the images. Check out this post: http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/2013/09/how-lightroom-works-with-metadata-from-other-applications.html

Where Lightroom plug-in custom metadata is stored and whether it can be edited externally

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