Transferring from ThumbsPlus to Lightroom

Notes by Walter vom Saal.  Updated 3/24/2012

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Introduction

This document contains instructions for how to move a large database of photo information from ThumbsPlus to Lightroom.  It describes how to move keywords, annotations (captions), and information about galleries (collections).

I apologize in advance for the length of this document.  I wanted to put in detailed step-by-step instructions, plus several notes and cautions, so this got longer than I had intended.  Many of the steps are for special circumstances and normally can be skipped.  The document is a bit repetitive because I wanted to be sure you wouldn’t miss any important cautions if you jump around.

Please let me know if you have any comments, corrections, or a better way to transfer information from ThumbsPlus to Lightroom.  Email to me directly at vomsaaw@oneonta.edu.  Please use the words “ThumbsPlus” or “Lightroom” in the subject line of your email so I will see it.  If I receive suggestions that might be helpful to others, I will add them to this document.  Thanks in advance for your help!

For simplicity, I refer to ThumbsPlus as Thumbs in what follows.

This process transfers information from Thumbs to Lightroom by transferring the information from Thumbs into the metadata of the files, and then from the metadata back out into the Lightroom catalog.  This means the process will not work with files that do not allow metadata. (See the note on File Types below.) It also means the process will not work with off-line files.

Most of my photos are JPEGs.  It is possible that these procedures also may work with RAW files if you have a ThumbsPlus RAW plug-in and it works properly.  However, see the CAUTION below on RAW files: I found that certain procedures in Thumbs destroyed the RAW files, so I excluded RAW files when I transferred information from Thumbs to Lightroom.  See more details on File Types below.

I am using ThumbsPlus Pro version 7.0 and Lightroom 3.3 on a Windows platform, so the procedures below refer to those versions.

Background

I have used ThumbsPlus (available at http://www.cerious.com/) for many years and have been very happy with it.  It has many powerful features, including several features Lightroom does not have. However, along with many others, I have become dissatisfied with ThumbsPlus and decided to move all my photos to Lightroom. I wrote up and tested the procedures described below. I post them here in the hope that others might help me find errors or better ways to do this, and that the ideas presented here might be useful to others.

For some additional notes on ThumbsPlus, see Notes on ThumbsPlus

For some additional notes on Lightroom, see Notes on Lightroom

For a comparison of the two, including some of the features ThumbsPlus has that Lightroom does not (but I wish it did), see A Comparison of ThumbsPlus versus Lightroom

The following are my procedures for transferring my 40,000 photos from ThumbsPlus to Lightroom.

Definitions

The critical things to transfer are:

Keywords.  Keywords can be assigned to photos in both Thumbs and Lightroom.

Annotations and Captions.  Annotations in Thumbs are Captions in Lightroom.  These are text files that can be associated with a photo in the database.   They can contain detailed information, comments, etc.  They also can be used for comments to display with the photo when uploading to web albums or showing the photo in a slide show.

Galleries and Collections.  Galleries in Thumbs are the equivalent of Collections in Lightroom.  Both are collections of photos that may be drawn from anywhere in the catalog.  In each case they are not actual files of photos, but rather just selections and re-orderings of existing photos that may be named and organized for easy access.  They can be used to create slide shows, make web albums, export photos to a CD or to other locations, and so on.  Collections also can be used to keep records of photos you have printed, sent to others, presented in shows, uploaded to web albums, used to make greeting cards, or collected together for any other purpose.  There are some minor differences between Thumbs Galleries and Lightroom Collections that are described below.

Databases and Metadata. Both ThumbsPlus and Lightroom store information about the photos in a database maintained by the program. In addition, each program also can write some of the information to the metadata of certain image files, including jpg files. Keywords in the database can be written to and retrieved from keywords in the metadata (IPTC keywords in a jpeg file). Annotations in Thumbs and Captions in Lightroom can be written to and retrieved from captions in the metadata (IPTC captions in a jpeg file). Galleries and Collections are retained in the database only and information about them is not available in the metadata of the image file. Note: The database in Lightroom is called the catalog.

Summary of general procedures

Transferring keywords from Thumbs to Lightroom is fairly straightforward.  The basic procedure is to put the keywords that have been assigned to photos in Thumbs into the IPTC header data of each photo, then extract them again in Lightroom.  I have spelled out detailed procedures below, along with a few precautions and comments.  (Especially see the caution below that telling Thumbs to move keywords into files may destroy some RAW files.)

Transferring annotations in Thumbs to their equivalent captions in Lightroom is also fairly straightforward.  Again I have spelled out detailed procedures below, along with a few precautions and comments. There is a minor problem in that captions with multiple paragraphs created by external programs don’t display properly in Lightroom (see detailed note below).  The process of transferring annotations gets a bit complicated if you want to keep some captions already in Lightroom for some photos, but replace them with annotations from Thumbs for other photos, so the section on that below is longer and more complicated than I would like.

Transferring galleries in Thumbs to their equivalent in Lightroom collections is less straightforward.  In the section on that topic below, I suggest how to transfer much of the information by assigning gallery-specific keywords.  However, I do not know how to automate the transfer of galleries in Thumbs to collections in Lightroom, and I do not know how to retain the order of photos in a collection without manually re-entering the order in Lightroom.  If you know how to do this, see the note at the top about sending me an email!

Brief overview of basic steps

Step 1: Preparation.  Back up both databases, make some settings in Thumbs to avoid problems later, and be sure any Lightroom keywords or captions you want to retain for the photos being imported from Thumbs are copied into the files.

Step 2: Galleries. To retain as much information as possible on photos that have been assigned to galleries in Thumbs, use Thumbs to assign keywords to all photos in galleries. 

Step 3: Keywords. Assure that all keywords currently existing in Lightroom are copied to the photo metadata so they will not be lost. 

Step 4: Annotations. Assure that all captions currently existing in Lightroom are protected so they will not be overwritten by new annotations from Thumbs.  This can be done several ways.

Step 5: Transfer information out of Thumbs. In Thumbs, copy keywords and annotations to the IPTC data of the files.  Keywords will be appended to existing keywords.  Annotations will replace existing captions.  You also may choose to copy keywords but not annotations for some files.

Step 6: Transfer information into Lightroom.  In Lightroom, read metadata from the files to add keywords and captions to the Lightroom database.

Step 7: Recreate Collections in Lightroom.  If desired, use the keywords assigned to photos that were in Thumbs galleries to create collections in Lightroom.  These collections will carry some, but not all, of the information from the galleries in Thumbs.

File types

CAUTION: The procedures I describe here do not work for all file types

I have tested these procedures with several file types. 

These procedures work with the following:

- JPG or JPEG (image file) – both keywords and annotations import.

- TIF or TIFF (image file) – both keywords and annotations import.

- PSD (Photoshop file) – both keywords and annotations import.  That is, you can write keywords and annotations from Thumbs into the files and read them in Lightroom BUT there are two restrictions.  First, PSD files will not import into Lightroom at all if “maximize compatibility” has not been checked when file was saved in Photoshop (In Thumbs, such files show up and can have keywords and annotations, but the thumbnail preview is not available).  Second, keywords and annotations saved to the file from Lightroom are not read by Thumbs (or at least I haven’t figured out how to do it).  This means that one small portion of the procedures described here won’t work for PSD files (section 4.d. below).

- NEF (Nikon RAW file) – will import into Lightroom but see the CAUTION below: If Thumbs is used to write metadata to a RAW file, it may change the file so it cannot be imported into Lightroom or opened in Photoshop.

These procedures do not work with:

- AVI (video file) (imports into Lightroom but no keywords or annotations import)

- BMP  (image file) (does not import into Lightroom)

- DOC (Microsoft Word file) (does not import into Lightroom)

- GIF (image file) (does not import into Lightroom)

- MPG (video file) (imports into Lightroom but no keywords or annotations import)

- PDF (Adobe pdf file) (does not import into Lightroom)

- PNG (image file) (does not import into Lightroom)

- TXT (text file) (does not import into Lightroom)

- WAV (audio file) (does not import into Lightroom)

[As a side point, one of the things I really liked about ThumbsPlus was that you could see all these file types and many others.  You could add keywords and annotations to them, and previews were available for most of them.]

Detailed instructions, notes, and precautions

You should do a few things before starting.

1.a. First, back up both databases

I’ve tried to check that everything I say here is correct, but there is NO GUARANTEE!  Back up both of your databases (the Lightroom database is called the Catalog).

In Lightroom: find the catalog (it has the extension .lrcat) and make a copy of it.  You can find the location of your Lightroom catalog by clicking Edit > Catalog Settings > General tab, and then click Show (or navigate to the location in Explorer).  It is not necessary to back up the Previews.

In Thumbs: find the database (it has the extension .td4) and make a copy of it.  If you don’t know where you keep it, try looking in File > Database > Open Database.

1.b. In Thumbs, select certain options to prevent problems later

Prevent Thumbs from making any new thumbnails, changing the database, or changing the metadata until we we explicitly tell it to:

In ThumbsPlus version 7.0:

In Options > Preferences > Thumbnails tab, set "Automatically copy image comments to database annotations" to Never, uncheck “Make thumbnails automatically,” and then click OK.

In Options > Preferences > Keywords tab, uncheck everything.

In ThumbsPlus 7.0 there is no metadata tab, but there is a Metadata tab in the version of ThumbsPlus that I have on another computer. I must check this, but it may be ThumbsPlus 7 SP2. If there is a metadata tab:

In Options > Preferences > Metadata tab, uncheck all boxes and then set Load DB annotation to Never. This again sets Thumbs so you can look at Thumbs and only see the info already in the database. Until we explicitly decide to do it later, we do not want Thumbs to load any new information into the database or write any new metadata to the photos.

To facilitate reviewing photos in Thumbs (This setting is not necessary, but it is helpful if you want to see keywords and annotations easily when you click on each photo in Thumbs):  Select the Info tab at the bottom left of the screen, right-click on the chart, check Show Blank Items, click Select Items, check Show field names at the bottom of the box, click the Image tab on the left, select the items “Keywords,” “Annotation,” and “Galleries,” and use the right arrow to move them from the Available list to the Selected list, and then move them to the top of the list.  Click OK.

1.c. In Lightroom, copy existing metadata to files

- This step is necessary because we will later be reading the metadata from the files into the catalog in Lightroom.  If we want to retain the keywords and captions now in Lightroom, we must ensure that they are in the files.

- If you have set Lightroom to automatically copy metadata to the files (that is, in Lightroom, Edit > Catalog Settings > Metadata > “Automatically write changes into XMP” is checked), you do not need to do this since it is already done.

- If that setting is not checked, select all files that may exist in both Lightroom and the Thumbs database, then right-click > Metadata > Save metadata to file. 

- This may take a while.  Watch the progress bar at the top left of the screen.

1.d.  In Thumbs, set up to read these keywords if desired

It is not necessary, but if you want to see those keywords in Thumbs, you must set Thumbs to read keywords from file IPTC metadata.  Here’s how:

In Options > Preferences > Keywords tab, check “IPTC keywords.”  Then select the folders or photos you want to look at and right click > Thumbnail > Make.

If you are dealing with lots of photos, it may take a long time for Thumbs to read all the metadata and update its own database.

Step 2. Galleries: Transferring Galleries in Thumbs to Collections in Lightroom

If you don’t use galleries in Thumbs or if you don’t care to retain gallery information, you can skip this entire step.

 I do not know a good way to automate the creation of collections in Lightroom from existing galleries in Thumbs.  The following procedures are only a partial solution.

 2.a. Revise the Gallery structure in Thumbs to be like that of Collections in Lightroom

ThumbsPlus allows galleries and sub-galleries, and allows photos in all galleries whether they are higher level galleries or lower level sub-galleries.   Lightroom allows photos only in the lowest level (collections) but not in higher levels (which are called collection sets).  To make Thumbs galleries parallel to Lightroom collections, expand all galleries in Thumbs and then be sure that all galleries with a minus sign next to them (indicating there are sub-galleries) have no photos inside. 

2.b. Use keywords to capture the information in existing Thumbs galleries

By using keywords in ways similar to those described below, information on the set of photos in each gallery will be retained, but information on the order of the photos within the galleries will be lost.

Here is the set of procedures I plan to use for my galleries.  It is specific for the particular ways I use galleries, and would need to be adjusted to reflect the way you use galleries.  The general idea is to assign keywords to all photos in each gallery, and use the keywords later in Lightroom to recreate the galleries as collections, or to just let the new keywords carry the information that the galleries captured.

Note that keywords are limited to 32 characters.

Here are new keywords I will use to add information to photos in Thumbs that can later be used in Lightroom:

one-star = indication to add one star later in Lightroom
two-star = indication to add two stars later in Lightroom
three-star = indication to add three stars later in Lightroom
four-star = indication to add four stars later in Lightroom
five-star = indication to add five stars later in Lightroom
selected = photos selected as best photos within a particular folder

a/ = photo selected for article [date_article_or_journal_name]
card/ = used in greeting card for [person_date]
cd/ = given on CD to  [person_date]
e/ = emailed to [person_date]
f/ = favorites in this folder
FB/ = Facebook gallery [date_topic]
g/ = gallery that is a collection of photos for some specific purpose
p/ = printed for [person_date_size]
project/ = project [date_topic
ss/ = slideshow [date_topic]
w/ = web gallery [date_topic]

For the above keywords, use the format noted in brackets, where date indicates the date in yyyy-mm format, and all other words are separated by underlines. For example:

p/=Joe_Smith_2011-09_more_information_here

Additional abbreviations:

OPT = options to consider within any of the above categories.

2.b.1. Many of my galleries are a subset of photos from a particular folder.  These are “favorites” and often are in an order different from the order they appear in the folder.  For each gallery that consists only of selected photos (favorites) from a particular folder, use Thumbs to assign the keyword “f/” to every photo in the gallery.  “f/” stands for favorites.  The slash is a code to be added to every photo in a gallery so I can find all photos that were in galleries by searching for slashes, which I do not use in other keywords.  (If you already use slashes in some of your keywords, choose some other unique character.)  Back in Lightroom, I can add stars or some other attribute to each photo having the f/ keyword, to indicate favorites in a folder.

2.b.2. Many of my galleries are records of photos I have printed for others.  For all such galleries, use Thumbs to assign the keyword “p/[person’s_name_and_date]” to every photo in the gallery.  Again, this keyword can be used later in Lightroom either to find photos directly or to assign them to collections.

2.b.3. Many of my galleries are records of photos I have emailed to others.  For all such galleries, use Thumbs to assign the keyword “e/[person’s_name_and_date]” to every photo in the gallery.  Again, this keyword can be used later in Lightroom either to find photos directly or to assign them to collections.

2.b.4. Many of my galleries are records of photos I have given to others on CDs or flash drives.  For all such galleries, use Thumbs to assign the keyword “cd/[person’s_name_and_date]” to every photo in the gallery.  Again, this keyword can be used later in Lightroom either to find photos directly or to assign them to collections.

2.b.5. Many of my galleries are records of photos I have used to print greeting cards to others.  For all such galleries, use Thumbs to assign the keyword “card/[person’s_name_and_date]” to every photo in the gallery.  Again, this keyword can be used later in Lightroom either to find photos directly or to assign them to collections.

2.b.6. Some of my galleries are records of photos selected for use in published articles. For all such galleries, use Thumbs to assign the keyword "a/[article_name]" to every photo in the gallery. Again, this keyword can be used later in Lightroom either to find photos directly or to assign them to collections.

2.b.7. Finally, many galleries are special collections of photos for various purposes.  For each gallery like that, assign all the photos in the gallery some descriptive name starting with “g/”.

AFTER assigning all these keywords in Thumbs, the keywords will be imported into Lightroom using the procedures described in Step 5 and Step 6 below.

In Lightroom, find a blank photo, put it in a folder named NOTES & INFO, and use Lightroom to assign the following keywords:

f/ = favorites in this folder
p/ = printed for [person] on [date]
e/ = emailed to [person] on [date]
cd/ = given on CD to  [person] on [date]
card/ = used in greeting card for [person] on [date]
a/ = photo selected for article
g/ = gallery that is a collection of photos for some specific purpose

These keywords will then appear in the Lightroom keyword list and will serve as reminders and definitions for the keywords described above. 

NOTE 2.1: keywords are limited to 32 characters.

NOTE 2.2: You could just create these keywords in the keyword list rather than assigning them to a photo.  I assigned them to a photo so they will not be purged if I ever choose to purge unused keywords.

NOTE 2.3: To search in Lightroom for all gallery photos that are photos printed (for example), search for keyword text containing “p/”.  To search for all gallery photos, search for keyword text containing “/”.

NOTE 2.4: To repeat what I’ve said before, the above procedures will retain information on photos in each collection, but will lose any information on the order of those photos in the collection.

Step 3. Prepare keywords in Thumbs to be transferred to keywords in Lightroom

This step can be skipped if you are fully satisfied with all the keywords you currently have in Thumbs.

3.a. In Thumbs, fix up and add keywords

Look at folder names and consider adding keywords by folder.  Also consider this: In Thumbs it is possible to automatically generate keywords from words in file names or words in folder names or both.  Use Options > Preferences > Keywords and check Words in File Name (ignore numbers) AND/OR Words in Folder Names.  If you decide  to do this for selected folders, set these options and then go to Thumbnail > Rescan > In Folder.  NOTE: when I tested using folder names, Thumbs generated a whole bunch of keywords from folder names in the path, so I DO NOT recommend that option.  Instead, selectively apply keywords to folders of photos when that makes sense.  For example, a folder of photos from Hawaii could all have the keyword Hawaii added.

3.b. Keywords will be transferred out of Thumbs and into Lightroom in Step 5 and Step 6 below

NOTE 3.1: Keywords are limited to 32 characters.

NOTE 3.2: There is some discussion in Lightroom forums about whether keywords that contain spaces may be problematic.  Some auto-completion of keyword entries, and some keyword searches, may not work correctly.  You can do a web search for “Lightroom spaces in keywords” to find out more about this.  [The following examples indicate problems with keyword searches.  A search for the keyword “hot dog” (using Text > Keywords > Contain All or Contains Words) finds a photo that has keywords “hot day” and “dog bone” (but not "hot dog").  A search for Sam Smith will find a photo that has both Sam Jones and Judy Smith (but not Sam Smith).  A search for “large man” will find a photo that has the keywords “large building” and “man”.  A search for “printed for John” will find a photo with keywords “not printed”, “hold for review”, and “rejected by John”.]

Step 4. Determine which Annotations in Thumbs you want to transfer to Captions in Lightroom

You may be able to skip this step. The procedure here ranges from very simple to more complicated depending on your situation:

4.a. No annotations

If you already know you DO NOT want to transfer any annotations from Thumbs to Lightroom, you are ready to transfer just the keywords:

--- Go to Step 5a and then 5b.

4.b. All annotations

If you already know you DO want to transfer all annotations from Thumbs into Lightroom, and you are willing to OVERWRITE any existing captions that may exist in Lightroom, you are ready to transfer both the annotations and the keywords to Lightroom:

--- Go to Step 5a and then 5c.

4.c. Some of each

If there is one set of photos for which you want to move annotations from Thumbs to Lightroom, and another set of photos for which you want to retain the captions now in Lightroom:

--- Go to Step 5a and then 5b for one set of photos and 5c for the other set of photos.

4.d. Individual review

You are arriving at this step if you have some photos with captions in Lightroom you may want to keep, and other photos with annotations in Thumbs that you may want to move to Lightroom and overwrite any existing captions, but you need to review the captions and annotations to determine which you want to keep.

4.d.1. If some of the photos to be imported from Thumbs are already in Lightroom, you must check to be sure that none of them have captions in Lightroom that you want to retain.  This can be done several ways.  I used Lightroom to find all photos that have Text > Caption > Isn’t Empty and added a (previously unused) purple color label.  Then I removed the label from photos that were in Lightroom only and were not going to be imported from Thumbs.  Next I removed the label from subsets of photos that had captions I did not care about.  For example, a large number of photos had OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA as a caption.  I removed the purple color from those because I didn’t about that caption.  [I also removed the caption itself, which required that I wait a while to be sure all the revised empty captions were written to the files.]  I also found a lot of imported photos I received from other people that had captions I did not care about, and removed the purple color from those.  This procedure left me with progressively smaller sets of photos that still had captions I wanted to keep.  I took steps described below to retain these captions.

4.d.2. In Lightroom, move the captions into the photos:

- select all photos with captions you may want to keep and add the keyword “HAS_LIGHTROOM_CAPTION” to those photos.

- also right-click > Metadata > Save metadata to files if you don’t have Lightroom set to do that automatically (as described in Step 1.c.).

4.d.3. In Thumbs, be sure the captions from Lightroom will not overwrite any existing annotations in Thumbs by mistake before you are ready:

- confirm this setting: Options > Preferences > Thumbnails tab > “Automatically copy image comments to database annotations” = Never, AND “Make Thumbnails automatically” is unchecked.

4.d.4. In Thumbs, find the photos that have captions in Lightroom, review them, and select those whose caption from Lightroom will be retained:

- In Options > Preferences > Keyword tab, check “IPTC keywords.”

- Select the tree or trees that contains the photos to be moved from Thumbs to Lightroom that are also currently in Lightroom and may have Lightroom captions.  Right-click >  Rescan > In Tree.  (You can click the Tasks tab at the lower left to see progress.  It may take a while.)

- Find all photos with the keyword HAS_LIGHTROOM_CAPTION.

- Review all those photos to be sure there are no annotations on those photos already in Thumbs that you do not want to overwrite with the Lightroom captions.  If there are any such photos, remove them from the selection of photos you have in Thumbs.

NOTE and CAUTION: This works with JPG files and TIFF files but not with PSD files.  Thumbs will copy annotations and keywords to the PSD files and Lightroom will read them, but it does not seem to work the other way.  When I tried to add keywords or annotations in Lightroom and write them to the file, and then rescan in Thumbs to regenerate the keywords and annotations from the file, no keywords or annotations showed up in Thumbs for PSD files although they did show up for JPG and TIFF files.  There may be some other settings in Thumbs or Lightroom that allow this, but I couldn’t get it to work with the settings described here.

4.d.5.  In Thumbs, copy the Lightroom captions you want to keep into the Thumbs database. 

- Your selection of photos in Thumbs now contains all photos that have Lightroom captions you want to retain.  Now copy all the captions that you want to keep from Lightroom into the Thumbs database as follows. 

- Temporarily set Options > Preferences > Thumbnails tab > check “Automatically copy image comments to database annotations” = Always.

- Select all the photos, right-click > Thumbnail > Make. 

- Reset Options > Preferences > Thumbnails tab > check “Automatically copy image comments to database annotations” = Never.

- You may want to review all the photos to see if other unwanted information in addition to the Lightroom Caption also has been copied into the annotation (see Note 5.a.2. below).  If so, it can be removed manually from each photo now (right-click > Properties > Database tab) or this can be done later in Lightroom.

- At the end of this process, Thumbs has all the proper captions (some captions from Lightroom you have imported, and some annotations from Thumbs you have retained),  and they are ready to be all moved into Lightroom.

- Go to Step 5a and then 5c.

Step 5: Transfer information out of Thumbs into the photo files.

5.a. Read the following Notes and Cautions

NOTE 5.a.1.  CAUTION: You should exclude NEF files and maybe all RAW files.  Writing metadata to RAW files in Thumbs may change the files so they cannot be imported into Lightroom. I found that this happened with my Nikon NEF files.  When I moved metadata to files in Thumbs using Edit > Edit IPTC Info and I had it set to write either annotations or keywords to the file (or anything else such as a copyright notice), NEF files were changed and slightly increased in size, even if I had no keywords or annotations assigned to those photos.  After that, the files would not import into Lightroom and would not open in Photoshop.  If you have any RAW files, test a sample photo to see what happens.  If there are problems, exclude RAW files from this procedure.

- To exclude all NEF files, do this (or in these instructions replace NEF with any other file extension you wish to exclude):

- In Thumbs, Edit > Find by Query (or Ctrl+F), Filename tab, Clear All, enter filename mask = *NEF.  Click OK.  This selects all NEF files.  The bottom left of the screen shows how many files you have selected.  Once the files are selected you can review them to see if any have keywords or annotations.  (To set Thumbs settings that make this review easier, see Step 1.b. above.)  If they do, you can make notes on those to re-enter later in Lightroom.  If you shoot photos with the setting that records a JPG file along with the RAW or NEF file, you also can right-click the photo and choose Go To Folder, where you can add the keyword and/or annotation to the associated JPG file.  Then return to the Found Files list (below Galleries on the left) and continue reviewing the files.  After doing this, remove all the RAW or NEF files from the database this way: Use the Find command to find all RAW or NEF files, then press Ctrl+A to select all, right-click > Thumbnail > remove.

- Do another search for all RAW or NEF files to confirm that they have all been removed.

NOTE 5.a.2.  The Thumbs command to “Automatically copy image comments to database annotations” may sometimes produce unexpected results because it puts text from both the JPEG IPTC Caption text and the JPEG Comment field into the ThumbsPlus annotation.  Lightroom does not use the JPEG Comment field, but some other applications do, and so you might see some text in the annotation in addition to the caption you added in Lightroom.  I found this happening only rarely.  When it did happen, it was easy to see, and I could edit it and delete it manually.  (As one example, I received some scanned JPEGs from a friend that had a company name in the comment, probably from some software that was used in the scanning or previous processing of the photo.)

[For more on the relationship between Annotations, IPTC Captions, and JPEG Comment fields in ThumbsPlus, see here. I recommend that ThumbsPlus users do NOT use the JPEG Comment field, even though it can be viewed and edited in ThumbsPlus, because the use of both IPTC Captions and JPEG Comment fields produces some strange behavior in ThumbsPlus.]

NOTE 5.a.3.  Captions with multiple paragraphs do not display properly on Windows machines.  Pressing Enter to create a new paragraph displays properly in the ThumbsPlus annotation and does get transferred to the IPTC data (it shows up as a new paragraph with an extra line between paragraphs in Irfanview) but does not show up in Lightroom.  Here is more information from a reply by John R. Ellis on January 27, 2011, to a question I posted in a Lightroom forum:

Windows LR 3 has a long-standing bug in its handling of newlines in metadata.  LR always represents newlines in metadata with a single character (the Unix/Linux/Mac "\n", Ctrl+J, ASCII decimal 10).  It will preserve pre-existing newlines in the metadata (even if you edit it), and if you enter a newline in the Metadata pane using Ctrl-J or Ctrl-Enter, that newline will get written out properly as a single newline character. However LR does not properly display pre-existing newlines -- they get silently elided.  

So if you enter a newline in the Caption box of the Metadata pane using Ctrl-Enter, that newline will be displayed properly.  If you then use Save Metadata To File, the newline will be properly recorded as a single newline character.  But if you then reread the metadata into LR with Read Metadata From File, the newline no longer displays correctly (but it will be preserved). 

This is an elementary programming bug caused by the differences between Mac (which uses one character to represent newlines) and Windows (which uses two characters, Ctrl-M Ctrl-J, though many modern Windows applications accept either representation).

- from http://forums.adobe.com/message/3431662  

NOTE 5.a.4.  I do not know the limit on the size of the Annotation / Caption field.  I did test it up to 1,000 characters and it worked fine.

5.b. In Thumbs, for some files, add the keywords but not the annotations to the files

- If you want to add both keywords and annotations to all files, jump to Section 5.c. below.

- Information cannot be written to the files if they are Read-Only.  Using Explorer, select the highest level folder containing the files, right-click > Properties and uncheck Read-Only.

- Select all photos for which you want to add the keywords from Thumbs to the files but do not want to add the annotations from Thumbs to the files.  (Keywords will be added to existing keywords that may be in the files from Lightroom, so the new keywords will not delete existing keywords.)  You can select the files by selecting the particular folders that contain those files, or by using the Find command in Thumbs with other criteria.

- Click on Edit > Edit IPTC Info (or right-click on photos and select Edit IPTC info)

- Click on Keywords in the top menu bar of the dialog box and select “Combine with database.”  You will see that the Keyword box is now grayed out and says “(append from database).” This leaves the existing keywords in the IPTC metadata and adds the keywords from the Thumbs database.

 [Caution: if you click this option and it is already checked, it UNCHECKS this option.  Look at the Keywords section to see whether you have done it correctly: it must be grayed out and say “(Append from database)”.]

 [Note: Do NOT choose Replace with database.  This erases the existing keywords in the IPTC metadata and replaces them with the keywords from the Thumbs database.  It will cause you to lose any keywords that are in the Lightroom catalog but not in the Thumbs database.]

- Be sure you are not also going to copy annotations to the files.  Check that the Caption box is empty.  If it says “(from database annotation),” you must click on Populate > Caption from Annotation and the Caption box will now become empty.  This will leave the caption unchanged.

- Click OK.  The selected files will be processed.  It may take a while.

- If you are not using any annotations, go to STEP 6.

 5.c. In Thumbs, for some files, add both the keywords and the annotations into the metadata of the files

- Information cannot be written to the files if they are Read-Only.  Using Explorer, select the highest level folder containing the files, right-click > Properties and uncheck Read-Only.

- Select photos for which you want to add the keywords from Thumbs to the files and also want to add the annotations from Thumbs to the files.  (You can select the files by selecting the particular folders that contain those files, or by using the Find command in Thumbs with other criteria. ) Keywords will be added to existing keywords that may be in the files from Lightroom, and will not delete existing keywords.  Annotations will be put in the captions of the files and will REPLACE any existing captions. 

- Click on Edit > Edit IPTC Info (or right-click on photos and select Edit IPTC info)

- Click on Keywords in the top menu bar of the dialog box and select “Combine with database.”  You will see that the Keyword box is now grayed out and says “(append from database).” This leaves the existing keywords in the IPTC metadata and adds the keywords from the Thumbs database.

 [Caution: if you click this option and it is already checked, it UNCHECKS this option.  Look at the Keywords section to see whether you have done it correctly: it must be grayed out and say “(Append from database)”.]

 [Note: Do NOT choose Replace with database.  This erases the existing keywords in the IPTC metadata and replaces them with the keywords from the Thumbs database.  It will cause you to lose any keywords that are in the Lightroom catalog but not in the Thumbs database.]

- Click on Populate > Caption from Annotation.  You will see that the Caption box is now grayed out and says “(from database annotation).”  This erases any existing caption from the IPTC metadata and replaces it with the annotation from the Thumbs database.

[Caution: if you click this and it is already checked, it UNCHECKS this option.  Look at the Caption section to see whether you have done it correctly: it should be grayed out and say “(From database annotation)”.]

- Click OK.  The selected files will be processed.  It may take a while.]

- Go to STEP 6.

Step 6: Transfer information from the photo files into Lightroom.

6.a. Consider a special process if you have multiple copies of photos

This is not necessary and can be skipped.  However, you may wish to treat multiple copies of photos differently.  For example, suppose you have folders that contain copies of photos for specific purposes (copies of photos printed for a particular person, copies used for a PowerPoint presentation, etc.)  After you transfer them to Lightroom, may want to know that these are copies rather than the original photos.  You can do this as follows.  When importing photos into Lightroom, start with the primary folders containing the original photos.  After these folders are imported, then import the folders that may contain copies.  First check “do not import suspected duplicates,” then import, then uncheck “do not import suspected duplicates,” to reveal any duplicates.  If desired, the duplicates may be placed in subfolders or identified with keywords so you know which photos are duplicates and you can eliminate or consolidate them later if desired.

6.b. Leave Thumbs and open Lightroom.  In Lightroom, extract the information from the files

- Select all photos that you are importing into Lightroom from Thumbs.

- If the photos are not yet in Lightroom, you can import them.  To keep them in their existing locations select ADD at the top of the import screen.  Double-check your import dialog to be sure you are not doing other things you don’t want to do, such as renaming the files, adding or revising other metadata such as copyrights or standard keywords, etc.

- If the photos are already in Lightroom, you can select them all, then right-click and select Metadata > Read Metadata from Files

- keywords from Thumbs for each photo (along with any prior keywords from Lightroom) will now be added to each photo.

- The annotation from Thumbs for each photo will become the caption of each photo.  It now will appear in the following places in Lightroom:

- Metadata default list under “Caption”
- Metadata IPTC list in the Content area under Description
- Metadata Large Caption list under Caption

6.c.  Clean up any temporary keywords or annotations used for this transfer

For example, remove the temporary keyword “HAS_LIGHTROOM_CAPTION” from any files that have it.  If you added other temporary keywords or captions to facilitate your transfer, find and remove those as well.  (For example, I used lots of keywords containing “TEST” and “TEMP” to test various parts of this procedure before applying the procedure to the entire database, so they needed to be found and removed later.)

Step 7: Recreate Collections.

If desired, use the keywords assigned to photos that were in Thumbs galleries to create collections in Lightroom, as suggested in Step 2 above.

Appendix

There are some additional complexities that I didn't want to mention above, because it's already too complicated. Here are a couple.

Annotations, Captions, and Comments

ThumbsPlus can deal not only with IPTC Captions, but also with JPEG Comment fields. I describe these here.

Strange behavior in ThumbsPlus

There is some confusion and overlap in ThumbsPlus in how it deals with IPTC Captions and JPEG Comment fields in JPEG images. I describe this a bit here in a section of the page on Annotations, Captions, and Comments.

 

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See also:

Notes on ThumbsPlus

Notes on Lightroom

A comparison of ThumbsPlus versus Lightroom

 

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