I thought about this some more over the weekend, and one thing that occurred to me is that virtually all of my photos go via Adode Lightroom. The image files do

I thought about this some more over the weekend, and one thing that occurred to me is that virtually all of my photos go via Adode Lightroom. The image files don't change; instead, all of the metadata and retouch history lives in Lightroom's database. I guess users of Aperture and iPhoto are in a similar position. Plain image files are fine on the way out of the camera (and maybe via a laptop), and on the way to the Internet (which will use low-res .jpgs with embedded metadata), but my central repository is currently Lightroom, which doesn't like opening up its database. Lightroom can, however, talk to external photo services through a plugin system; its Flickr and Facebook exports work like this. So maybe your photo app is another of these services, as far as Lightroom is concerned.