jpegs exported without metadata, can you think of a way to copy it over after export?

[William Petruzzo]

Hey folks, hoping someone can help me brainstorm a quick bit.

I've made a faux pas. I have exported about 30,000 jpegs from Lightroom (originally raw files). It's now almost 95 percent completed, and has taken nearly 48 hours (which seems long, but when the number gets that high, it's hard to tell). Unfortunately, I accidentally forgot to include the metadata in the export. Now, faced with the prospect of having to export everything again, I'm hoping there might be a way to trick Lightroom into copying the metadata from the raw files over to the jpegs.

The jpegs are stored on a different drive, but in exactly the same directly structure as the orignal raw files, and with exactly the same names, except the extension.

My original thought was to try and trick Lightroom into importing the metadata from the original catalog to a new catalog with the jpegs. Something tells me that's a pipe dream. But I'll have to wait until it's finished exporting to even try.

Nonetheless, I thought that of all the communities I know of, this was the most likely to help me sort this out, if it's even possible.

 

[KmH]

If you didn't check the Export Location option - Add To This Catalog - you'll have to import them back into the Lightroom catalog the Raw files are in to use Lightroom to do anything to the JPEGs..

Even with that, I'm not sure how you would use Lightroom to add the metadata as a batch process rather than 1 JPEG at a time.

There is the Synchronize function in the Metadata panel, but that is intended for the IPTC Copyright and Creator metadata that would be the same for every image it is sync'd to.

To get the Basic and Camera metadata info from each Raw file back to it's 'daughter' JPEG would again be 1 at a time..

A dedicated metadata read/write application like PhotoMe.de might be helpful.