I imported my photos from an external hard drive into Lightroom, edited my photos but what next...?!

Question

Adobe,
I imported my photos from an external hard drive into Lightroom, edited my photos and when i decided to export them the originals had not been updated and the deleted photos had not been deleted. How do i set it up so that once i import the photos, edit them and export they are then placed back in their original folder edited and updated?
I have managed to export the photos to another file but these were exported with an Adobe.xmp file. What is this and is this necessary?
Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

It's important to realise that LR is a DAM (Digital Asset Management) application - no images are actually imported into LR only links to where they are. Secondly, the details of any edits that you make to your images are kept only in the database and/or xmp files depending how you set this up in Preferences. In the general workflow e.g. edit in Lightroom, further edit in Photoshop and returning to LR then creating xmp files aren't really necessary. So just to emphasise - edits are stored in the LR's database, the original RAW images themselves don't change (non destructive editing). You can prove this yourself by desaturating an image (turning it into a B+W) and then look at the original images in Explorer - you'll see it's still being shown in colour.
Exporting an image is something different. By implication, you've finished with the image and perhaps want to save an image for posting on the web somewhere. Now assuming your not using any additonal and freely available LR export plug-ins, one way would be to Export a jpeg image to a folder on the desktop and this is allowed for in the Export dialogue. At this time LR reads any edits from it's database and applies those to the exported jpeg (or tiff) file it's going to send to the folder on the desktop.
As mentioned earlier, any edits and keywords etc are stored in LR's database - original RAW files remain untouched. XMP files also store the edits if LR is set up to create xmp files (in Preferences) but these are not really necessary unless you are going to be editing an already edited RAW file in another application. As an example - you import into LR's library a scanned negative. Now because strictly speaking LR isn't designed to work with negative images, you now open this file via Bridge into ACR and from here reverse the negative into a positive image. All fine and good except when you go back into LR what's shown is still a negative so what is needed is to update the metadata (LR > Metadata > Read Metadata from file) which will force LR to read the newly created metadata from the xmp file that Bridge generated. As already suggested, if you're happy editing your RAW files in LR and only LR then xmp files aren't really necessary - all the data being saved in LR's database.
Hope this has been of some help but if I might also suggest, purchasing a good book on LR from the outset thus getting to really know LR will pay dividends further on down the line.