Extracting DNG settings to xmp sidecars

[Victoria Bampton]

I LOVE this tip!!! I found it by accident when researching DNG a little more carefully, and this has completely changed my mind about DNG, even though until now I've always sat on the fence.

If you've got DNG files with settings, and you've got the proprietary raw files backed up elsewhere, there's not an obvious documented way of transferring the settings from the DNG to an xmp sidecar file that can be used with the proprietary raw file. Except there is!

When you make a DNG read-only, it defaults to using an xmp sidecar file instead of embedding the data.

So make the DNG's read-only, and then make an easily reversible change to those files (use a slider you don't usually use).

Write metadata to files (Ctrl-S/Cmd-S).

Then reverse the change, and write again.

Sidecar xmp files will have been created, which you can then borrow to use with the CR2 files. Anything that is stored in XMP is transferred.

To put them back to normal, simply change them back to read-write, and repeat the process. The xmp data will be embedded back into the file again.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Edit - thanks to samdring for pointing out that this only actually works for Bridge, and not for Lightroom! Not sure why there's a difference, but it's a fairly crucial difference!

 

[ehch]

More info on this topic:
- this works only for DNGs, not for TIFs or JPGs and indeed only in Bridge/ACR, not in LR.
- In Bridge you can view and export xmp data (and reimport) via: file>file info>last tab:Raw data.
However it only works for one file at a time.
- both Adobe and ACDsee Pro use xmp sidecars - but these are incompatible!!! Other packages (e.g. DxO Optics Pro, Capture One) have their own sidecars and filetypes - so you can "develop" one photo with several packages in parallel.