Blog
Convert Flickr metadata to Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop presets
22 July 2009
FlickrPhotography
Website development
Flickr allows photo metadata to be shown with each photo. The metadata contains shooting information about the photo- eg shutter speed, aperture etc. It can also contain the RAW conversion settings used to process the original RAW photo file. Therefore it’s possible to copy across the settings into your own Lightroom or Photoshop presets to create a similar ‘look’ for your own photos.

After quickly getting tired of copying settings across manually, I developed a tool which will output a Lightroom or Photoshop preset file based on the metadata found for that Flickr photo. Simply enter the full URL of the photo into the tool below and you’re away!
It is limited to photos which have metadata publicly available. Also custom point tone curve information isn’t converted- as the Flickr metadata page unfortunately doesn’t show all it.
Let me know if you have any suggestions or find any bugs. If you find it useful and have a website, please link to this blog post.

Update: Fixed missing Exposure value
This rocks!
It would be really cool if it could strip stuff from photoshop or acr. I don’t know if thats possible but it would be cool
Thanks for sharing this
Update: Added Photoshop/ACR export option
Thanks to Tracey for her help in testing it
Hi Joe, how can I get it as a preset not as a page full of words?
Would love to be able to get presets as I do not know how to convert from metadata pages to presets.
cheers
lila
Thank you for sharing this, which came to my attention through flickr.com. It doesn’t always work, as you warned, but when it does it’s very useful. Much more preferable to downloading a whole set of presets at once when you’ve not had the chance to preview them first.
@ lila:
Strange, it should save to a file on your computer, and not display the file. Is it displaying it in your browser? If so you could try going to File -> Save and try saving it as a file that way.
it shows kind of like it does if you click on flickr and you click on the photo properties and,no preset for LR at all.
I tried saving as a file but now i can not find it al all in my Mac.
sorry,bit stupid when comes to the kind of stuff
i tried everything,nothing works for me so far…all i keep on getting is a page full of meatdata informations; no preset!
anyone with same problem? how to fix it? any idea?
cheers
lila
@ Lila
You could try changing the .txt extension to .lrtemplate and it should work
Hey I think something’s wrong with the extractor because it’s showing up as a blank file with no info to make the preset
What photo URL are you using?
If I try the example URL (http://www.flickr.com/photos/joesmalley/3722015814/) it works fine- does that work for you?
Yea sorry it took me so long to reply I was in London, but I think it might of been my computer not the link sorry for the confusion
[...] this idea, photographer and web developer Joe Smalley created an easy to use tool that will allow you to give a particular ‘look’ to a picture, sourcing the EXIF data from a [...]
Yeah, I also had the same problem as Amanda. It saved just a blank file in an .xmp form.