These days I encourage students to leave Bridge and Camera Raw behind and use Lightroom for all of their basic image editing needs (resorting to Photoshop when heavy guns are required). But if you do find a reason to use Bridge and Camera Raw, you’ll discover that Lightroom does not automatically see and show any Bridge keywording, rating or other metadata changes, or Camera Raw image adjustment changes that you have made.
To update your images in Lightroom with any changes you have made in Bridge or Camera Raw, select them, right-click and choose Metadata>Read Metadata from File. This will read the XMP file that Bridge and Camera Raw have written the changes to. Of course if you have since made changes in Lightroom that haven’t been written to XMP, this action will overwrite your recent changes. All the more reason to use only one program.
I agree, however, Lightroom does not update as quickly as Camera Raw so that if you have a camera supported in new versions of Raw but not in Lightroom, your only choice is to convert to a DNG and then import into Lightroom. I prefer the raw format but save all my negatives in DNG format on my archival medium.
Thanks for your comment, Mark. From what I have seen, Adobe releases the LR and ACR updates on the same day. It is true, however, that the ACR update is often available early as a “release candidate” on Adobe Labs. And of course you’re right — converting your raw files to DNG before going to LR gets around the issue.
Is there any way to force lightroom to do this automatically, perhaps to force it to use XMP data only instead of it’s catalog? I use Lightroom, Bridge, and Photoshop/Camera Raw pretty frequently, and I’d like lightroom to default to using the XMP file.
Hi Gregg, you can have Lightroom automatically write changes you make in LR to the XMP files, in Catalog Settings. As far as I know though, there isn’t a way to have it put priority on reading the XMP files over the catalog. Btw, not everything done in LR is in the XMP files — for example, virtual copies and collections are only in the catalog.
Laura,
Thanks! I had that part working already, early on into my journey. It seems to ‘sometimes’ read the xmp files and update the catalog and develop modules, and when it doesn’t and i want to work on a specific picture, I guess I’ll manually update it.