Exports and the Lightroom handoff: what carries over

If you finish photos in Lightroom Classic, imagic can hand them over with your edits attached.

In the export dialog

• Lightroom handoff: writes .xmp sidecars with your edits. Lightroom Classic reads crop, rotation, white balance, tone, colour grade and effects from them.
• Copy originals: exports the source files untouched, with no re-encode. With the handoff ticked, a JPEG or TIFF export also copies the original RAW and its sidecar alongside.

What to know

• Sidecars work for proprietary RAW files: CR2, CR3, NEF, ARW, RAF, ORF, RW2 and similar.
• DNG, TIFF and JPEG keep their metadata inside the file and Lightroom ignores sidecars for them, so imagic tells you those are not supported rather than writing a sidecar that does nothing.
• imagic writes the sidecar to carry an edit across. A sidecar with only star ratings, without an edit, is not something it writes today.

Since 1.4.3, exports with duplicate file names no longer overwrite each other, and imagic warns you when the disk is full.

How do you move photos between imagic and Lightroom? If something does not carry over the way you expect, post the camera, the file type and which adjustment went missing.