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Tipp for the metadata management with Lightroom and LRTimelapse

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#1 Milindur
Hello,

whenn working with LRTimelapse and Lightroom you periodically have to save and load metadata to or from files to transfer settings between LRTimelapse and Lightroom. There is a keyboard shortcut for saving metadata to files (CTRL+S, Cmd+S). Unfortunately there is no keyboard shortcut for loading metadata from files.

For Mac OS X there is a feature built in the OS which allows to define shortcuts for every menuitem of an application, for details follow this link (thanks to Christoph Malin for pointing this out on Facebook).

I found a solution for Windows as well. Just download the tool AutoHotkey and then create a text file called e.g. Lightroom.ahk (the file extension .ahk is important) with the following content:

Code:
^+l::
SetTitleMatchMode 2
IfWinActive, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
{
    ;ID of menu-item removed since it depends on the installed plugins :-(
    ;SendMessage, 0x111, (id of menu-item), 0,, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
}

Then start the script by double-clicking it.

This assigns the hotkey CTRL+SHIFT+L to the "Load metadata"-item in the main menu of Lightroom (only when Lightroom is active).

You can even put the script in Windows autostart to always activate it when starting the computer.

This script checks if a window with a title containing the text "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom" is active and then sends an internal windows message to that window with the parameters to activate the menu command (0x111 = WM_COMMAND and 0x9D5C = Load metadata).

Regards
Christian

Update: I removed the ID from the script because the ID of the menu-item depends on the installed plugins. So I have to figure out a way to get the correct ID from Lightroom.
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#2 Gunther
Thank you Christian, that's awesome. Maybe you could compile a EXE of that (possible with AHK) and I can put it into the download section.
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#3 Milindur
Hi Gunther, yes, that's possible (see attachment of this post). Maybe I can design a nicer icon for the EXE, the default one is a bit simple...

Note 1: This was tested with Lightroom 5.4 64-bit. With other versions of Lightroom the keyboard shortcut could possibly trigger another menuitem.

Note 2: It is possible to add other shortcuts. I just have to find out the parameter value for the SendMessage command.

Note 3: It is also possible to make a small tool which is configurable and allows to define custom keys (if CTRL+SHIFT+L does not suite your needs). In this case I won't use AutoHotkey but a small tool developed by myself.
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#4 Gunther
Hi Christian,
I just tried it but it's not working for me. Neither with German nor English language setting. Any ideas?
Best
Gunther
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#5 Milindur
Hi Gunther,

that's interesting. Friday and yesterday it worked for me but today it doesn't :-(. I think I have to do some futher investigation why this is the case.

Regards
Christian
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#6 Milindur
Oh, that's getting bad. The message ID for the load metadata command depends on the installed plugins and the number of their menu-items.
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#7 Gunther
would have been too nice...
A shame that adobe is not listening to us, it would be such an easy task to add that shortcut.
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