Preserving XMP files

[gknorman]

I am a day 1 Newbie so apologies if I missed this somewhere obvious...  need to use Exiftool to rename Sony A9ii AWR (raw) files to A9, since LR CC does not yet process A9ii AWR files.  So I downloaded and used exiftool(-SonyModelID=ILCE-9 -overwrite_original ) to make this change, having already reviewed all the A9ii images in Photo Mechanic for culling and assigning star values.  After the exif conversion, I noted the AWR images could now be rendered by LR CC, but were no longer showing the star assignments I previously made in Photo Mechanic, even though those XMP files remained in the same directory as the converted files by Exiftool.

Is there a simple solution to preserving the XMP sidecar information using Exiftool?

Many thanks.

[StarGeek]

Exiftool doesn't touch the sidecar files unless you give explicit commands to do so.  If you rename the AWR files you need to rename the XMP files as well.

[Alan Clifford]

Exiftool doesn't touch the sidecar files unless you give explicit commands to do so.  If you rename the AWR files you need to rename the XMP files as well.

Re-reading the post, it looks like the op didn't actually rename the files.  Rather he changed a tag.

[Alan Clifford]

Just guessing here:  is there a tag in the xmp file that identifies it as an A9ii file?

[StarGeek]

Re-reading the post, it looks like the op didn't actually rename the files.  Rather he changed a tag.

Hmmm... I guess so.

But changing the RAW doesn't change the XMP sidecar.  That has to be explicitly added to the command.  It would be more on the Lightroom side to figure out why it stopped using the sidecar.

[Alan Clifford]

But lightroom didn't stop using the sidercar file as the op said that Lightroom was unable to process A9ii files.  So it never used the sidecar file.

Which is why I'm guessing there is aa a9ii tag in the sidecar file that stops lightroom from using it.

[StarGeek]

Ah, very good point.