XnView Software

I am having difficulty figuring out the path forward to move from Lightroom to XnView MP. The one post I found somewhat helpful was one where some noted that tag didn't seem to come over. He apparently exported a large number of jpg's from Lightroom and then imported them in XnView.

I have well over 30,000 images, some of which are jpg's but most are *.nef. Do I need to export all of these from Lightroom to a new location before I can import them into XnView? Alternatively, can I simply point XnView to the directories in which they are located and somehow capture the metadata? What is the most straightforward way of moving into XnView?

Thanks.

Since Lightroom syncs the metadata to EXIF or IPTC fields for JPGs there should be no problem with just adding/opening them in XnViewMP. There are different options in Settings -> Metadata where to read from.

For NEFs I'm not quite sure how they are handled in Lightroom. I assume Lightroom writes XMP sidecar files when syncing. This should be handled correctly by XnViewMP too. But you have to look how the XMP sidecar files are named. There are too possibilities here: filename.extension.XMP or filename.XMP. You can switch between the two in the above settings.