The crop indicator in the contact sheet

[SzurszewskiJ]

I cull in PM, then process in Lightroom. I've noticed that if after processing photos in LR I go back to PM, photos that have been cropped have a dotted line box indicating the crop that was performed in LR.  I have a couple of questions about this:

• How does PM determine that the photo was cropped in LR?
• Cropping is an OK way of knowing that the photo was processed in LR, but not all photos get cropped. Is there something else that PM reads that would be a more reliable way of determining that the photo was adjusted in any way in LR?

It would be very helpful to see which photos in a PM contact sheet have already been adjusted in any way in LR, whether or not they have been cropped. Is there a PM setting or some other way to do this?

Thanks!

[ahoward]

Lightroom writes the crop metadata in the XMP metadata. If you examine the metadata of the file you'll probably see something like this:

crs:HasCrop="True"
   crs:CropLeft="0.185980"
   crs:CropTop="0.157018"
   crs:CropRight="0.824514"
   crs:CropBottom="0.769128"
   crs:CropAngle="0.000000"

Lightroom's 5 color labels can be read by Photo Mechanic, as can its star ratings. If you're seeing crops in Photo Mechanic from Lightroom, you'll likely see star ratings too with no further configuration. If you don't see color labels that Lightroom adds, some configuration is sometimes needed.

Hope that helps.