Library module LR Substitutes Creation Date for Capture Date Without Permission.

[greg_6]

Lightroom Version Number

10.3

Operating System

1. macOS 11 Big Sur

Lightroom has stripped the Capture Date and substituted the Creation Date of thousands of my photos. These were taken digitally a long time ago. Like in 2003-2009. I would really like to get the metadata back. I can't remember the exact date and time of any of the photographs. That's what I was counting on Adobe Light Room to do.
And before you all start with the Indeeds and the well it's your faults, please try and remember that Adobe Lightroom did this, not me. I never mess with the metadata. And, BTW for years Lightroom striped the color profile, too. So I did not use it for that reason, but when they finally offered the choice to keep the color profile within the raw file, I decided to give Adobe Lightroom another try. Now I have several thousand of photos with the Creation Date substituted for the Capture Date.
What shall I do to recover the metadata?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Can you please explain exactly what you did and how you concluded that Lightroom stripped those metadata? Lightroom does not alter raw files and as raw files do not contain a color profile, Lightroom never stripped a color profile either. So let’s try to find out what really happened.

 

[johnrellis]

LR has serious bugs and design flaws handling photos that are missing industry-standard metadata date fields, and its behavior with respect to this has changed over the years (for the worse). Since there are many date fields, assigned different names by various apps, let's get the precise details of what you're observing, and with that, I can suggest ways forward that may help you recover the dates and will definitely stop the problem from getting worse.

1. Uncheck the option Catalog Settings > Metadata > Automatically Write Changes Into XMP and keep it off until all the issues have been resolved. Writing metadata back to the files will change their file Date Modified dates and (sometimes) their file Date Created dates.

2. Similarly, avoid doing Metadata > Save Metadata To File.

3. Select one of the problem photos and post screenshots of the following:

a. Metadata > Default panel:

b. Metadata > EXIF panel:

c. Right-click the photo's thumbnail in LR and do Show In Finder. In Finder, right-click the photo's file and do Get Info; post a screenshot:

d. If the file is raw and has an accompanying .xmp sidecar, select the .xmp sidecar, do Get Info, and post a screenshot of that too:

 

[greg_6]

Can you please explain exactly what you did and how you concluded that Lightroom stripped those metadata? Lightroom does not alter raw files and as raw files do not contain a color profile, Lightroom never stripped a color profile either. So let’s try to find out what really happened.

Well there ya go. May we please acknowledge that every raw file contains a jpeg and that said jpeg contains a color profile and that Lightroom has been removing the jpeg and therefore the color profile? May we also acknowledge that Lightroom has had errors, bugs, and downright problems and that those errors, bugs, and downright problems are not and have not been, originated by the end user? May we also agree that my original post requested a solution, and that Lightroom fanboys responded with “user error” rather than even a suggestion of a solution?
You have all been amazingly polite yet predictably solution free. Thanks for your help and your sincere courtesy.

 

[greg_6]

Thank you for your help. I will try all that and post what happens. Thank you very much!

LR has serious bugs and design flaws handling photos that are missing industry-standard metadata date fields, and its behavior with respect to this has changed over the years (for the worse). Since there are many date fields, assigned different names by various apps, let's get the precise details of what you're observing, and with that, I can suggest ways forward that may help you recover the dates and will definitely stop the problem from getting worse.

1. Uncheck the option Catalog Settings > Metadata > Automatically Write Changes Into XMP and keep it off until all the issues have been resolved. Writing metadata back to the files will change their file Date Modified dates and (sometimes) their file Date Created dates.

2. Similarly, avoid doing Metadata > Save Metadata To File.

3. Select one of the problem photos and post screenshots of the following:

a. Metadata > Default panel:
View attachment 17326

b. Metadata > EXIF panel:
View attachment 17327

c. Right-click the photo's thumbnail in LR and do Show In Finder. In Finder, right-click the photo's file and do Get Info; post a screenshot:
View attachment 17328

d. If the file is raw and has an accompanying .xmp sidecar, select the .xmp sidecar, do Get Info, and post a screenshot of that too:
View attachment 17329

 

[greg_6]

Thank you for your reply. Most of the photos are jpegs or tiffs. I haven’t seen a raw file, yet they probably exist. There are over 2 million photos in my catalog, and very few have substituted metadata. The last couple of versions of Lightroom Classic for Mac have done an good job of cataloging them.
The changes of metadata probably occurred with the version of Lightroom Classic that was on the go six years ago. I took a five or six year break from Lightroom owing to the mess it made.
This may take a couple of days for me to complete. It’s a load off my mind to know someone is willing to advise and help. I will do all you ask and I will not fail to get back to you.

 

[johnrellis]

I'll dig into this either late tonight or tomorrow morning.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

May we please acknowledge that every raw file contains a jpeg and that said jpeg contains a color profile and that Lightroom has been removing the jpeg and therefore the color profile

No we may not. Lightroom does not remove the embedded preview and/or a color profile, it creates a preview of its own. What you see in the catalog does not happen inside the image too. The originally embedded preview will still be inside your raw file. And the embedded preview almost never ‘contains a color profile’. Camera manufacturers do not normally embed color profiles, because that would make each image larger. Especially in the past, when memory cards were small and expensive, that would be a problem. So instead they agreed on a different approach, where images with an underscore as the first character of their name were supposed to be AdobeRGB and images without that underscore were sRGB images. That is still used today. That means that renaming JPEG images (in Lightroom, or any other app) could change the apparent color space, but that would be user error, not a bug. For raw images renaming still does not matter because the color space is set on conversion to RGB. What you set in the camera is irrelevant for raw files.

May we also acknowledge that Lightroom has had errors, bugs, and downright problems and that those errors, bugs, and downright problems are not and have not been, originated by the end user?

Yes, that is true. Lightroom has many bugs. But fortunately it does not have any bugs that change the original raw file, at least not to my knowledge. If you work with raw files, then even ‘automatically write changes to XMP’ does not do that. It writes to a separate sidecar file. That means that you can have plenty of problems with Lightroom, and in certain situations the bugs could even make Lightroom totally useless for you. That is all true. But in the end you can simply take your original raw files, use them with another application, and all the Lightroom bugs will have disappeared, because nothing was written into the raw file itself. For tiff and jpeg this is unfortunately different if you have 'Automatically write changes to XMP' enabled. That does write to the image itself. If you do not have this enabled, then everything is the same for those files. The originals will not be changed.

Anyway, I leave this with John to sort it out. He knows a lot more about Lightroom’s peculiarities with metadata than I do.

 

[johnrellis]

I'll dig into this either late tonight or tomorrow morning.

Oh, sorry, I misread your post on my phone, thinking you'd posted some attachments. I'll wait until you have to time to follow through. Avoiding saving metadata (steps 1 and 2) will avoid one particular problem (which may or may not be what you're observing).