Syncomatic plug-in – now syncs adjustments too
I’ve just released a new version of my Syncomatic plug-in.
Syncomatic’s original purpose was to tidy up metadata when you are faced with sets of pictures whose names match but whose metadata is out of sync. For instance you may have lots of TIFs or JPEGs which have been output from your raw files, but you then added keywords to the raw files. How do you then make 1234-edit.tif have the same keywords and other metadata as the original 1234.nef, make 1235-edit.tif the same as 1235.nef and so on? Syncomatic does that job.
It now does the same with adjustments (at least as many as it can).
Why would one want to do that? Well, for example, I was contacted by someone who had taken 15,000 pictures in a very short period, and sheer pressure of work had led him to switch his camera to Raw+JPEG and import only the JPEGs. He’d then added ratings, captioned and keyworded the JPEGs, done some quick adjustments, and submitted modified JPEGs to his clients. Now he was home and wanted to import his raw files and prepare stock and portfolio quality images from them. That was where he hit a wall. He could restore the raw files into the same folder as the JPEGs, and then synchronise the Lightroom folder – but Lightroom hides the JPEG and brings in the raw files without any IPTC metadata or adjustments. Even if one had saved the metadata back to the JPEGs, it wouldn’t really treat them like sidecars. The other approach for RAW+JPEG is to change the catalogue option so it imports separate files, but then there was the problem of copying the metadata and adjustments from each JPEG to its corresponding raw file. That’s why I updated Syncomatic.
Another possible application is when you have a new camera which has a raw file type which Lightroom doesn’t yet support. What you might do – after filing a complaint with the camera maker and demanding they offer a DNG option – is shoot Raw+JPEG, import the JPEG files, and add your metadata and adjustments. When Lightroom is updated, you can import the raw files and use Syncomatic to update them. I’m not sure if that will work in practice, but I suspect so.
Now, there are some limitations – but not many. Essentially I’m using the develop preset mechanism, so Syncomatic can only apply adjustments that you can save in a preset. Above all, that means cropping can’t be synchronised. But it does pretty well everything else, which isn’t too shabby.
It would be great if this plug-in could also ensure that all the items in a stack have the same title, caption, keywords, rating, or date/time.
Many people use stacks as described in the LR Help: “You can create stacks to group a set of visually similar photos together, making them easy to manage. Stacks are useful for keeping multiple photos of the same subject or a photo and its virtual copies in one place.” But LR hasn’t really thought through stacks, and it’s all too easy to end up with different titles, captions, keywords, etc. applied to the different photos in the stack.
I was thinking of a plug-in that scanned all the stacks in a selection and made sure that all of the selected metadata fields were synced from the top item in the stack, quite similar to your plugin. It wouldn’t make sense for me to write such a plug-in if it’s an “easy” extension to yours :-;
I agree with you about Adobe not having thought stacks through (I wrote up some ideas here and here). The attitude seems to be that people merely need to see stacking is on the feature list, and then its functionality needs to be no worse that anyone else’s. So it’s fine for selecting the best of a burst – hence fancy effects, and no drill-down metadata as the hidden items will be tossed away. I find Lightroom’s stacking next to useless (just a great way to lose pictures), and so I simply stack items more in hope than expectation, and then leave the stack in its expanded form.
In fact I agree so much that the plug-in does actually contain some disabled more-or-less working code to sync stacked items, and it was only “operational” aspects (rather than my own half-baked Lua skills) that made me hold back. For example, if you are in a collection when you make the selection, would you really want to update items which may not be in that collection? I can see arguments each way. Or take ratings, would you want the same rating for all shots in the stack? And what if your selection / source contains 2 or more members of the stack? While the code can detect which image is the top of the stack, or just higher, there’s no visual clue when you’re in a collection. I came up with a few other awkward cases , none technically impossible but all needing a bit more thought about options and UI.
BTW nice work on Any File. I’m pretty sure I tweeted it as soon as it was released.
Hello John,
Nice plugin I should say! But I don`t get the purpose of develop settings sync? Those use cases you`ve provided won`t work since JPEG adj. differ from RAW ones, at least exposure settings and WB.
Besides that it is an excellent job!
Michael
Sure, I take the point that you wouldn’t expect to transfer adjustments between JPEG and raw and get the finished fine quality result, but you’d get a lot of raws into the ball park quickly. Adjustment below the Basic panel (eg B&W treatment, Effects) would be pretty consistent. Also it’s not just JPEG to raw, but could be between raw and DNG, JPEG and PSD/TIF.