Get started
One login, two interfaces
You can look before you sign in: drop photographs on the browser client and it reads every field they already hold, with nothing installed and no account. Scanning needs one — and after that you can work in your browser or set the plug-in up inside Lightroom Classic, with the same scans, the same balance and the same nine fields either way.
- An account. Creating one takes an email address and a minute, and the first scans are included.
- Photographs that know where they were taken — from the camera, from a track log, or dropped on Lightroom’s map by hand.
- For the plug-in: Lightroom Classic, on macOS or Windows. For the browser: any current browser, and JPEGs.
In your browser, right away
Nothing to download and nothing to configure. This is the shorter road, and it is also the newer one — see the note at the foot of this section before you point it at anything you care about.
- Open www.photowrite.co/app and drop some
photographs on it — JPEGs, or raw files, with their
.xmpsidecars where they have them. No account yet: each one shows what it already holds in all nine fields, so you can see what a scan would be writing over before you decide to start one. - Sign in when you want to scan, with the address your invitation went to. Your photographs stay on the page while you do — that is the whole reason signing in happens here rather than first.
- Scan, read, then save. The scan puts the offered words beside
your own, field by field, and every one of them can be edited before it is kept.
Nothing reaches your disk until you press Save. For a JPEG, Save produces a
copy. For a raw it writes to the
.xmpsidecar beside it, merged — the nine fields are replaced and everything else in the sidecar is kept. The photograph itself is never altered either way.
What the browser cannot do yet
A raw scans perfectly well on its own, but drop its .xmp
with it where there is one. A browser can only read the files you hand
it, so a raw dropped alone is scanned with its nine fields taken as empty, and
on the download route its sidecar is written fresh rather than merged. A
browser cannot develop a raw either, so the picture it reads is the JPEG preview
the file already carries: the camera’s rendering, or your
catalogue’s from whenever it last wrote that file, rather than the
photograph as you have since edited it. There is no map picker: a photograph that
never carried a coordinate is set aside rather than guessed at.
And it is much the newer half of PhotoWrite, with a fraction of the plug-in’s use behind it. Start on a handful of frames you can check, and tell us what it gets wrong — that is the most useful thing anyone can send us right now.
In Lightroom Classic, about five minutes
The plug-in adds one command to Lightroom’s File menu and writes into the catalogue itself. You set it up once, and after that it is there whenever you want it.
- Download the plug-in from your account page and unzip it. Put
the folder somewhere you will not move or tidy away — Lightroom looks for it in
that exact spot every time it starts, so Downloads is the one place not to leave
it. Then File → Plug-in Manager → Add, and choose the
photowrite.lrpluginfolder. - Create a key on the account page — you will only see it
once — and paste it into Plug-in Manager → PhotoWrite, with the
address below. Then click Check connection, which answers with the
account it reached and how many scans are left on it.
Service URL https://www.photowrite.co API key pw_…
- Run it. Select some photographs, then File → Plug-in Extras → Run PhotoWrite on Selected Photos. Start with a dozen you know well.
The browser client, the download and your key are all on your account page.