Exposure’s migration tool enables you to easily bring over information from a Lightroom catalog, which is helpful if you’ve got an extensive Lightroom image collection you want to migrate to Exposure. This video walks you through the process of using it.
Photos: Hiram Trillo
Transcript
In Lightroom, notice the various kinds of metadata applied to the images – flags, ratings, color labels, keywords, and more. Our goal is to bring all this information over into Exposure. For that, we’ll use Exposure’s migration tool.
When Exposure was installed, it detected Lightroom on my computer and automatically installed the migration plug-in. Access that tool under File>Plug-in Extras, and select Migrate Catalog to Exposure. The Lightroom to Exposure dialog displays the migration options.
Exposure can migrate culling and naming metadata and some basic adjustments, like cropping and rotating. You can find more details about exactly what information is migrated on our website.
The migration tool isn’t able to transfer information from Lightroom’s editing panels in the Develop module, such as Basic and Tone Curve adjustments. Instead you can export the photos with the edits applied either as a TIFF or JPG file.
Export a Copy of Adjusted Images enables you to pick the file type, color space, bit depth, and resolution for the images you made visual adjustments to in Lightroom.
With this option selected, Lightroom will export a copy of the images with the Lightroom edits applied next to the original files. This step is optional but worth doing if you want to recreate the looks you developed in Lightroom. Use the copy as a visual reference when making editing adjustments with Exposure’s tools. After you’ve migrated the images, you can identify the adjusted version by “_migrated” in the file name.
Export Keyword Library will migrate all of the keywords in Lightroom’s keyword list, including those that haven’t been applied to an image. If you want to use these keywords on future images check this so that they are added to Exposure’s keyword list.
With all the controls set, click Migrate. Exposure will open, and the Migration Report dialog will explain what will happen in Exposure.
Exposure detected that some of the folders that are migrating from Lightroom already have had changes made to them in Exposure. It will not apply any Lightroom metadata that would overwrite these changes.
In the migration report, you can see the folders from the Lightroom Folders panel that will be added to Exposure’s Folders panel, where they are called “bookmarks.”
In Exposure, I now see the migrated images. These include the original images and the adjusted TIFF versions that have “_migrated” in their filename.
The organizing metadata for each image has carried over into Exposure. This includes the colors, flags, ratings, and keywords that were originally applied to the images. Over in the Metadata panel, the fields have also been populated with personal info. As well as keywords in the keyword library, which appear in the Migrated Keywords list. Notice that they’ve also retained their hierarchy.
In the Folder panel, migrated collections will appear under Collections at the bottom.
