I’ve just released version 3.3 to fix a harmless bu t very annoying bug that I introduced yesterday – sorry – and I took the opportunity to address what must be one of the most frequent questions about the plugin – why can’t it access the User Comment field?

No-one knows why Adobe have never made this field available to plugins – it looks like a simple oversight – and despite many requests from plugin developers Adobe have never gone back and added the field to the SDK (the mechanism plugins use to access Lightroom data).

Using the back door SQL method I mentioned when version 3 was released, Search & Replace can now read the EXIF User Comment and copy it to other fields.

So access to User Comment is read-only – the plugin can’t update the field values. While I suspect I could use some SQL to update the catalogue, that’s a red line for me.