Development Settings, History and Metadata

Note: This page and those previous (Lightroom - Combining File System and Database and Raw Files and Lightroom Import) provide import technical information to better understand Lightroom, the nature of raw data files and the metadata that Lightroom support in the editing process.  Some readers may wish to jump forward to the overall workflow page and return to these aspects later.

Saving Development Settings and Metadata

As mentioned. the image processing 'recipe' that you establish can be saved in each image's raw DNG file.  This creates and effective backup in the case that the processing history that Lightroom maintains is lost.  

There are two versions of the 'recipe' used to process each image.  The first is the processing History.  This can be viewed by selecting an image in Lightroom while in the Development module and the expanding the 'History' pane on the left hand side of Lightroom.  This will then show each processing step.  Lightroom keeps the processing History for every file in it's own database (with suffix .lrcat).  It's part of the current 'Catalog' loaded in Lightroom.  Periodically, you will be asked to back the Catalog as you exit Lightroom. 

As you edit, Lightroom creates a composite snapshot of all import and Development settings.  It uses this to produce the images that you view during editing.  With each edit, this composite set of edits can be saved (updated) in each respective DNG file.  If Lightroom's 'Catalog' were to become corrupt or lost, then as you load each DNG file with it Lightroom would be able to at least load all Development settings.

You can enable the saving of all image processing settings by going to Lightroom's Edit menu item, then selecting 'Catalog Settings...' followed by clicking on the Metadata tab. Then enable "Include Development settings in metadata inside JPEG, TIFF, PNG and PSD files.  Though not specifically called out, DNG files are also included in this selection.

If your raw data is not saved in standard DNG (or JPEG, TIFF, PNG or PSD) format or if you wish to preserve other non-editing settings, such as ranking (1-5) then you will also need to enable "Automatically write changes to XMP".  For DNG files, XMP structure is within the DNG file.  For proprietary raw files, a separate XMP 'side car' file is created in the same folder as the raw file.