Practical Photo Tip: How to Import XMP Files into Lightroom

You have XMP files for your image files and want to import them into Lightroom to continue working with your edited images? In this article, you’ll learn how to quickly and easily import XMP files into Lightroom.

No matter if you work professionally as a landscape photographer, outdoor photographer or just as a hobby photographer, sooner or later you will run into the dreaded issue that your raw data is no longer matching up with the matching XMP files. This issue causes your Lightroom catalog to crash frequently as it tries to located the lost XMP data, and you need old raw data from a backup, etc. Been there, done that?

First off to avoid doing all that editing over again, you are hopefully saving your edits in Lightroom as external XMP files – if you don’t know what XMP files are and why you need them, read our article “XMP files: The most important basic setting in Lightroom“.

There are three ways to import your XMP files into Lightroom. We will introduce you to these here – don’t worry, it’s much easier than you think.

We use .xmp files regularly, for instance when we need to do changes and show fast results to a client. We also have to consider .xmp’s when doing those extremely important externally backups. following the correct workflow can save one much time and prevent any future heartache – especially when you sorting to different backups from one work folder that contains a lot of different files.

Import the XMP files into Lightroom in 2 (really easy) steps

1. Step “Folder Structure”: All solutions start by putting the XMP files and matching raw images into the same folder. Important: Do not place the .raw file and .xmp into seperate subfolders but rather keep them together in the same folder.
2. Step “Import XMP files”: Three variants are available here:

Variant A: Import the raw files into Lightroom the way you always do. Lightroom now automatically tries to recognizes the XMP files and assigns them directly to the corresponding images. If this doesn’t work immediately, try restarting Lightroom and/or recall the Import dialog, just as you would otherwise.

Variant B: If the raw data is already catalogued, go to library mode, select “all” and then select “Metadata” -> “Read metadata from files”.

Variant C: If the raw files are already catalogued, go to library mode, right-click the folder in the folder area of Lightroom’s left pane. Select “Synchronize folders”. Enable “Check for metadata updates”.

And voila! You have successfully imported your XMP files into Lightroom.

Marius

Hi, i am Marius, i love exploring the mountains and nature. Friends say, i know the mountains better than most locals, but actually i get lost all the time while photographing ;). Read more about the Mountain Moments Team.