message about changes of metadata photos

[royvonw]

Lightroom Version Number

LrC 11.4

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

Hello world,

I now have a large number of photos that have received the following message about metadata (with label at the top right of any photo)
It only concerns photos that have been edited :

"The metadata of one or more of these photos has been changed by another application. Should Lightroom import the disk settings, or should the disk settings be overwritten by the catalog settings?"

I honestly don't understand what to do with this:
- do nothing
- or follow one of the advices mentioned and if so why.

I would love to get advice on what to do and why!
Thanks in advance !

Roy

 

[Califdan]

One thing you didn't mention, but implied, is that you have no knowledge of changing the photo with any application outside of LrC. This would include Adobe Photoshop if used indepenently of LrC.

The warning message you are seeing is known to be less than 100% reliable. In some cases just viewing an image with some software program can make some sort of metadata change which LrC detects. In other cases, using some sort of cloud sync program like Drop Box (among others) could trigger this warning - espeically if the cloud based copy o the image is accessed by multiple devices. And, sometimes it is never determined what caused the image to be marked.

But, sometimes the warning is valid. For example if you opened the image with something other then LrC which has editing capability you may have inadvertantly changed something in that other applicaiton.

But, your quesiton is what to do. if you are quite confident that you did not do anything on purpose to change anything on the image except through LrC then you should overwrite the file with data from the catalog. On the other hand if you do confess to using some other software to make changes to the image and you want LrC to know about those changes you woujld select to update the catalog with the settings from the disk file (which may over write changes you made in LrC).

When there is usch a conflict of metadta, LrC will always take what's in the catalog over what's in the disk file. So, if you're really not sure but the image in LrC looks correct - including the visual look of the image as well as the metadata associated with the image, then I would write the catalog data back to the disk file to clear the warning, or just ignore the warning. You can also set LrC to not show that warning anymore.

 

[clee01l]

This message appears for too many reasons. Many of which can not be explained. If you use Lightroom as your only Image Data Manager, then All of the metadata in the Catalog file will be correct and every export will draw from the Catalog metadata for new files.

Unless you are editing the master originals outside of Lightroom (and you should not), you can safely ignore the message.

 

[royvonw]

Cletus, because I always make all edits only within LrC, I'll just ignore this -junk- message.
Thanks for your advice.

Roy vW.