And now, in the style of 2020, here’s something a little different. This one is about something I’ve developed for my fellow photographers – and, even more specifically, those of us who shoot with Fujifilm cameras. If you don’t fall into this niche category, you should probably close your browser and go make yourself a pot of tea right about now.
The short of it:
I was running into some metadata frustrations after loading my Fujifilm RAF raw files into Adobe Lightroom Classic; the star ratings I flagged in my camera were nowhere to be found, film simulations I shot with were ignored, and the running shutter count/actuations was not hiding in its normal places. And so I solved these issues for myself by building the Fujifilm Toolkit plugin!
The long of it:
When I returned from Guatemala in 2017 I had over a month of photographs from a new Fujifilm X-T2 camera that, in lieu of not traveling with a computer, I had reviewed nightly and flagged in camera using its built-in star rating system. When I got home and imported all these photos into Lightroom, I was surprised (and dismayed, to put it lightly) that the star ratings did not translate/load into my catalog at all. The resultant sifting through that many photos was a tedious task that took days which, in my mind, should have been avoided. I would much rather be able to hop right into my digital asset manager and get to editing my flagged photos (never mind the time in would save).
The good thing about having a degree in computer science is that I could go ahead and write some code to fix it for myself. And so I did, and over the past few years developed a plugin for Lightroom to solve a bunch of pesky little metadata frustrations I was having. At first it was just a crude solution for myself to optimize my workflow, but upon mentioning it offhand to a few colleagues I soon found there was others interested. So when Covid-19 hit and a good portion of my schedule was suddenly cleared, I used some of that newfound time to develop its functionality properly for both Windows and Mac under a shareware model (free to use in a limited fashion and paid to unlock batch processing), built a purchasing/registration system, and a website to be the front facing side of it all.
All this is to say, here is a plugin I developed for myself for Adobe Lightroom Classic. It has optimized my workflow and, if you also photograph with Fujifilm cameras, I hope it will be of significant value to you too.
List of functionality at time of launch:
- Show complete list of metadata: View a long list of ALL the hidden metadata contained in an image file (works great for all cameras beyond even Fujifilm ones).
- Load in-camera film simulations: Set the camera profiles to the exact film simulations you used when composing images with your Fujifilm camera.
- Load in-camera star ratings: Set all the star ratings in your catalog to match those that you set on the back of your Fujifilm camera.
- Show shutter count/actuations: Get the hidden shutter count/actuations information for your Fujifilm camera.
Here’s to getting it done in 2020! Download the plugin for yourself over at www.fujifilmtoolkit.com.
Screenshot of the Fujifilm Toolkit plugin menu within Adobe Lightroom Classic.