Export for Lightroom¶

krites is built to hand off to Lightroom: cull and correct in krites, finish in Lightroom. There are two ways the work reaches your catalog.

Option A — export a rendered keeper set¶

krites export --shoot ~/Pictures/smith-wedding

Export is the only step that writes pixels. It renders the keepers with every edit baked in — removals → straighten → crop → look — into the shoot's export/ directory. Import that set into Lightroom as finished frames. Given the same records, export is deterministic — re-run it any time.

export does not write XMP sidecars

Rendering and sidecar-writing are separate commands. If you want the cull to show up on your originals in Lightroom, run krites xmp write as well — Option B below.

Option B — write XMP sidecars beside the originals¶

To surface the cull decisions in Lightroom without a rendered export, write sidecars next to your originals:

krites xmp write --shoot ~/Pictures/smith-wedding

Point Lightroom at the originals and the krites verdicts (keep/maybe/reject, as flags/ratings) appear on import — you cull in krites, then finish from your own RAWs in Lightroom.

What does and doesn't travel into XMP¶

Travels	Does not travel
The verdict, as a star rating (keep 5, maybe 3, reject 1) and a colour label	The look — white balance, tone, grade, LUT
The crop rectangle	Object removals
The straighten angle	The reasons behind a verdict, and any AI review

Looks and removals are not oversights. Camera-Raw XMP cannot express a generative fill, and a half-applied colour mapping would open in Lightroom as something that is neither krites' render nor your original. If a keeper needs either in Lightroom, import the rendered file from export/ — Option A.

A RAW+JPEG pair collides on one sidecar¶

xmp write strips the frame's extension rather than appending to it, so IMG_2043.ARW and IMG_2043.JPG both map to IMG_2043.xmp. When both are in the shoot, one verdict overwrites the other, and which one wins is not deterministic.

If you shoot RAW+JPEG and rely on sidecars, ingest only one of the two.

Cleaning up sidecars¶

krites reset does not remove .xmp files — resets only touch .krites/ and export/. The sidecars live in your own folder, so deleting stale ones is a manual step.

See the export and xmp write command references.