Metadata Status

[Sturm]

New user to Lightroom here. I'm using v3.6 on my Windows 7 x64 PC, but will be upgrading to v4.0 soon. Until then, a question: Why do some photos never have a Metadata status of "Up to date"?

I'm a good user and always hit <CTRL>-<S> after making metadata changes, so that they are baked into the DNG and JPG files. Well, they should be, anyway. I have noticed, however, that they absolutely refuse to be written to a handful of files.

I've got 172 images in my 2004 folder. Of those, about a dozen or so will always show a Metadata Status of "Has been changed", even though I've not made any changes to it after the first major revision. I can select the thumbnail, hit <CTRL>-<S>, and it shows "Up to date", but if I click another thumbnail, then back to the first one again, it reverts to "Has been changed". WTF!?

It should be noted that all of my photos are stored on a NAS (Synology DS211j), but the catalog files are on my local PC. Can anyone please explain why this handful of apprently randomly-chosen images will never show a Metadata Status of "Up to date"?

 

[Mark Sirota]

Welcome to Lightroom Forums.

I have a guess about this -- any chance those 172 files from 2004 were marked as "locked" in the camera, before they were imported to Lightroom? Not all cameras have this functionality, but those that do generally set the "immutable" bit in the filesystem. It is likely that this setting was preserved when the files were copied off the card/camera, and is still there, so Lightroom does not have permission to write to the files.

I'm not a Windows user and I don't know how to inspect the files to see whether they're locked in this way; hopefully one of our Windows gurus can jump in and tell us.

 

[Sturm]

Thanks for the quick reply, Mark.

The camera I used back then was a Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi, which was considered a pro-sumer level camera in its day. I don't recall any "locking" function in that camera at all, but checking the files themselves in the operating system's file browser (Windows Explorer) does not show that they are Read-Only. And even if the files are "locked" somehow, wouldn't Lightroom throw up a warning message when it detected that it couldn't write the metadata to the file?

I know that saving the metadata to the file isn't completely necessary in Lightroom, since it is saved to the catalog files, but I would just like that extra layer of protection, especially when I upgrade to v4.

 

[Mark Sirota]

I would have thought it would complain about that... You might want to file a bug report on the official Adobe bug report/feature request forum; there's a link to it in the grey header at the top of the page.

 

[Sturm]

Well, if it is a bug, then it's possible that it could have been fixed in v4. I'll go ahead and upgrade tonight and see what happens. *fingers crossed*

I'll post here with my findings. Thanks, Mark!

 

[Rose Weir]

Are you doing update previews and write to metadata?
I had imported tifs into the V4 (as part of my testing)and they produced this same phenomena that you describe. I was manually updating the metadata at that time...select all, update previews etc...Then I just clicked on the write metadata to file or disk...the other choice listed above the 'update thumnails etc) and those tifs retained their metadata status.
I assumed it was because they were tifs that this would occur.
It came to my attention because I made a Smart Collection and any image with changed metadata would be in that smart collection. The tifs would not leave the collection until I chose the alternate metadata update menu command.
Rose

 

[Sturm]

It seems to have been a bug with v3.6. I just upgraded to v4 and, using the same catalog, went through and saved the metadata on that handful of troublesome files. On a few of them, I even had to hit <CTRL>-<S> a few times before it finally changed the Metadata Status to "Up to date".
Thanks to Mark and Rose for doing your best in trying to help me. I am very glad Adobe seems to have fixed that bug!