While hanging out with my good friend Nevada Wier last week, we talked about Lightroom and some tricks she learned while teaching her last photo workshop in India with George Jardine, the Adobe Lightroom evangelist. One of the options she told me about was leaving the "Automatically write changes into XMP" box unchecked in the catalog preferences which is its default mode as in the image below.

In version 1.3, checking the "Automatically write changes into XMP" box doesn't slow the program down nearly as much as it did in earlier versions. But if one would like to get the most out of Lightroom in terms of speed then there is another option which is basically to leave the box unchecked, and every once in a while go to "Metadata > Save Metadata to File" if you still want the XMP files saved out to the folder where your original images live.

This novel idea achieves the same results as using the XMP automatically but allows Lightroom to run at the maximum speed. The only downside is if Lightroom crashes or freezes for some reason and you haven't saved the XMPs then you have lost all of your work for that session. Other than that which is rare, this is a slick way of making Lightroom run just a bit faster. And once you "Save Metadata to File", then the XMP files are built next to the raw images just as they were with the "Automatically write changes into XMP" box checked - hence, when browsing the images with Bridge CS3 the worked up raw files appear as they were processed in Lightroom.

As this is a critical part of my workflow, up until now I have had the xmp box checked all the time. In my next session using Lightroom I plan to give this new idea a spin and see if I notice a performance bump. If so then I might very well alter my workflow and write my self a post-it note so I remember to "Save Metadata to File" often.

That's it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark