I fully understand the 'community acceptance' issues. I was hoping they would respond to my post.Ībout custom metadata. I guess those people aren't currently active on the board. I know that people use both Photo Supreme and IDimager because I've done searches on the names of these applications and found a bunch of postings in this forum that include these application names in their posts. I might have developed an Access or VB front end too, but I preferred the excruciating torture of learning Lua (OK, I learnt far more than I needed).

No one seems to use those two apps you mention, and in general few Lr users use a second cataloguing app. Unfortunately they don't store data in classic relational tables but dump chunks of Lua text that you'd need to parse. The catalogue needs to be closed (single user access) and it would still be difficult to use Lightroom-entered data effectively.

For example, you could create a database application in Ms Access to contain your custom data and build nice UIs, connecting to a Lightroom catalogue via the open source ODBC driver. Fine if you like putting data into a silo - let's hope you don't want to get it out of there!Ī similar approach is to use ODBC. But the trouble with custom xmp is no-one else knows it's there, and few apps ever allow you to read or display it in their own UI. I haven't looked at Bridge's File Info panels for a few years, but it might be easier to extend those, if you are determined to have custom xmp fields. One advantage is that it would be in-Lightroom, so you can take advantage of the metadata filter and smart collections, as well as the obvious benefit of only needing to know or workaround two apps' quirks. From our discussions you are probably in that group, but I think you'd be better rewarded off with the other route of creating your own plugin. You can make such processes work if you are disciplined and understand xmp metadata.

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