When you click a photo in this digital age, a lot of information gets saved, it’s not only the light that you have captured. Almost all digital cameras these days save extra information with your pictures. This extra information gives details about the type of camera used, exposure provided, focal length, white balance, shutter speed, aperture and several other tidbits about the picture taken. This information is called EXIF data which stands for Exchangeable Image File Format.

The EXIF data also contains the RAW conversion settings, stored when a photographers digitally process their pictures. These RAW conversion settings can contain details such as brightness, contrast, vignettes, white balance, temperature and several other options that can totally transform the images. So, if you copy this data from one picture to another, you can actually, in some way, give the second picture a similar ‘look’ like the first one.

Using this idea, photographer and web developer Joe Smalley created an easy to use tool that will allow you to give a particular ‘look’ to a picture, sourcing the EXIF data from a Flickr photograph. This is how he explains the process:

After quickly getting tired of copying settings across manually, I developed a tool which will output a Lightroom or Photoshop preset file based on the metadata found for that Flickr photo. Simply enter the full URL of the photo into the tool below and you’re away!

It is limited to photos which have metadata publicly available. Also custom point tone curve information isn’t converted- as the Flickr metadata page unfortunately doesn’t show all it.

The tool can be used to create dramatic transformations of pictures. If the look of the downloaded preset doesn’t suit the picture well, you can always tweak each individual setting manually.

Note: If the preset downloads as plain text or in a txt file, simply change its extension/save it as .LRtemplate (for Lightroom) or .ACR (for photoshop)

Convert Flickr Metadata to Lightroom/Photoshop presets