What's new in MetaMagic v1.4 —
color labels, IPTC location & faster batches.

Every MetaMagic release tries to fix one or two real pain points that come up when you process hundreds of photos at once. Version 1.4 focused on three areas: knowing what worked and what didn't, speeding up batches with repeated locations, and making the Lightroom catalog smarter about places.

If you're already running MetaMagic, the update is automatic — restart Lightroom and the plugin will fetch v1.4 on the next run. Here's the full breakdown.

1. Color labels for batch results

This was the most-requested feature in the last two months. When you run a batch of 200 photos, how do you know which ones succeeded and which silently failed? You'd have to open each photo and check the keywords field. Tedious.

Now MetaMagic can mark every processed photo with a Lightroom color label:

After a big batch, just filter Lightroom's Library by color label = red and you instantly see every photo that needs a re-run. No more guessing, no more opening photos one by one.

Both colors are configurable — if you already use red and green for your own culling system, switch them to blue and purple in the plugin settings. The feature is off by default, so enable it in File → Plug-in Manager → MetaMagic → Color labels.

2. IPTC Location fields written automatically

This one is for photographers shooting with GPS. Before v1.4, when MetaMagic read GPS data, it used the location for richer keywords and captions but didn't actually fill in the IPTC location fields in Lightroom (City, State/Province, Country). You had to type those in yourself or hope your camera wrote them — which most cameras don't.

Now the plugin does the full job: reads GPS coordinates → reverse-geocodes them via OpenStreetMap → writes the result into the proper IPTC fields. So your Lightroom catalog has structured, searchable location data for every GPS-tagged photo — useful for editorial agencies, archive search, and your own organization.

Rural and remote areas are also better handled now — if there's no city nearby, the plugin falls back to county, suburb, or locality instead of leaving the field empty.

3. Geocoding cache — significantly faster batches

If you shoot 100 photos in the same park, why look up the same GPS coordinates 100 times? Before v1.4, MetaMagic did exactly that — every photo triggered a new reverse-geocode call. Slow and wasteful.

The new geocoding cache groups GPS coordinates to 4 decimal places (~10 meters of precision) and reuses location data across photos taken in the same area. On a wedding shoot or a city tour, this means the batch finishes noticeably faster — sometimes 40–60% faster — depending on how clustered your locations are.

What this means in practice

• 200-photo travel shoot, single location: from ~10 minutes down to ~6 minutes
• 500-photo wedding, mostly one venue: from ~25 minutes down to ~14 minutes
• Mixed shoot, many different locations: roughly the same, but with much fewer external API calls

This is invisible to the user — it just works. No setting to toggle.

4. Improved progress experience

The old progress bar showed just a generic "Processing photos…" message. v1.4 shows the actual photo currently being processed, plus live success/fail counters as the batch runs:

You can also cancel a running batch from the progress bar, which is useful if you realize halfway through that you forgot to enable Editorial mode or change the keyword count.

5. Batch confirmation dialog before starting

A small but useful safety net — before a batch starts, MetaMagic now shows a dialog with the number of photos selected and the credits required. This prevents the most common accidental mistake: clicking "Generate" on the wrong selection and burning through credits on the wrong photos.

At the end of the batch, the summary now appears as a Lightroom bezel (the floating notification that disappears on its own) instead of a popup dialog you have to click. Less friction, same information.

Under the hood

A few things changed that you won't notice directly but are worth mentioning:

• Better error handling on slow networks — connections retry automatically instead of failing silently
• The plugin now also logs which keywords were skipped due to Lightroom's character restrictions, so you can review them in MetaMagicLog.txt
• Reduced memory usage during very large batches (1000+ photos)

What's next

The next major area is per-agency keyword optimization — different keyword styles for Shutterstock vs Adobe Stock vs Getty Editorial. The AI already understands the distinctions; it's mostly a UI question of how to expose that choice cleanly. Expect that in v1.5.

As always, the full version history lives on the changelog page. If you ran into a bug or have a feature request, the contact form goes directly to me — I read every message.

— David Mallic, MetaMagic