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I use Lightroom 5 to organize my photos. Every photo is tagged and I rely heavily on smart folders based on metadata and these tags. OS X Mavericks provides a better support for tags on the operation system level (see e.g. OS X 10.9 Mavericks: The Ars Technica Review – Tags).

I wonder if it is possible to automatically add Mavericks’ tags to my files based on Lightroom’s tagging (independent of other meta data written to the image file)? This would help me to include them in existing smart folders and other tag-based structures outside Lightroom.

Thank you for your help. This question is about organizing photos based on their organization in a popular digital asset management/digital image processing application, so I hope this is the right Stackexchange project to ask for advice.

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  • I think the question is, do these tags get stored in the metadata of the file itself, and if so where? If it is a field within the EXIF/IPTC of the images, then having Lightroom filter or create smart folders based on that data is not an issue. I think the question I have for you would be better answered by superuser or the stack exchange site that applies to OSX. – dpollitt Nov 4 '13 at 22:12
  • @dpollitt Thanks for your comment. The Mavericks tags are not stored within the EXIF/IPTC metadata. John Siracusa on Ars Technica says: "The actual Tag information is stored in its own separate extended attribute named com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags." There are a lot of LR extensions around, maybe also one for my issue. – lejonet Nov 5 '13 at 9:57
  • There's also an Apple focused stackexchange where you might have better luck finding a solution. However, I don't understand why you want this extra layer of tags based on the metadata tag. You can already search for keywords (= Lightroom tags) with a smart folder in Finder. So what is the advantage of LR tags -> Mavericks tags -> search for Mavericks tag vs. LR tags -> search for keywords? – Saaru Lindestøkke Nov 6 '13 at 1:06
  • @BartArondson The advantage is not adjusting every smart folder and workflow to search for Mavericks tags and keywords from LR when there are files that are tagged outside LR. – lejonet Nov 6 '13 at 17:11
  • I'm not very good at programming, but I think it should be possible with some coding. Here's a relevant question about applying Mavericks tags programmatically and here's code that extracts the keywords such that they can be used in the filename. The idea would be to extract it using the latter code and use that as an input for tags. The tools are there, now just someone to put it all together... – Saaru Lindestøkke Aug 11 '14 at 8:28

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