Note: This article contains information about a third-party product. Adobe may make changes at any time. Please contact Adobe for support with Lightroom.
Camera Bits does not have a tool that will scan a Lightroom Catalog and add the images that it includes to a Photo Mechanic Plus catalog.
However, if you have images sorted into a dated folder structure within a larger parent folder (Lightroom's preferred structure), you can scan your catalogs in a few quick steps. If you're using a different structure with parent folders in different locations - such as on different drives, you can still follow these steps, but make sure you add each parent folder (the topmost folder) for each location in Step #5.
This guide assumes that you are using Lightroom Classic and not Lightroom CC.
- Open Lightroom and go to the Lightroom menu on macOS or the Edit menu on Windows and select Catalog Settings…
- In this window, select the Metadata tab, and make sure the box for Automatically write changes into XMP is checked. Close the window with either the red X (macOS) or by selecting OK (Windows).
- Lightroom should begin writing all metadata, either as embedded XMP or sidecar files. If you have a lot of images in your Lightroom Library, you may see a progress bar in the top left corner of the Lightroom window, and your computer may take some time to do the work of writing these new files.
- Once this operation is completed, the metadata can now be read by Photo Mechanic Plus.
- Go back to Photo Mechanic Plus. Use the Catalog menu and select Scan to Catalog… then, under Folders to Scan, select Add.. and locate the parent folder that contains the images in your Lightroom Library. Select Start, and all images and their metadata will be scanned into the Photo Mechanic Catalog.