  With the advent of new photon tagging facilities and novel experimental
technologies it has become possible to perform photoproduction cross section
measurements of pseudoscalar mesons on nuclei with a percent level accuracy.
The extraction of the radiative decay widths from these measurements at forward
angles is done by the Primakoff method, which requires theoretical treatment of
all processes participating in these reactions at the same percent level. In
this work we review the theoretical approach to meson photoproduction
amplitudes in the electromagnetic and strong fields of nuclei at forward
direction. The most updated description of these processes are presented based
on the Glauber theory of multiple scattering. In particular, the effects of
final state interactions, corrections for light nuclei, and photon shadowing in
nuclei are discussed.
