Modified Photos to Re-Publish populating without photos being modified

[johngpt]

Lightroom Version Number

Lr 6.14

Operating System

1. Other (please note in thread)

This is a behavior that has gone on since I began using Lr to publish to online media.
I haven’t come across a fix as yet as I google. Searching here at Lightroom Queen hasn't shown a response either.

I'm using Lr 6.14, the last version before the subscriptions.
Mac OS 10.11.6 El Capitan
All photos in my Lr catalog are on external hard drives. There is only one catalog.
Between four hard drives, the catalog contains 128,000 photo files from 1999 to present.

Yesterday really brought home the problem to me.
I looked at a smart collection set for keywords about clouds which encompassed folders from all years and all hard drives.
I hadn’t made any Develop changes to any photos that had previously been published.

Later when I went to publish a newly edited image, Lr populated the Modified Photos to Re-Publish section with photo after photo.
I tried to select them to mark as up to date but the section kept on populating with more photos.
Eventually all 2,512 photos that had previously been published ended up in the Modified Photos to Re-Publish section.
I eventually got them all selected and was able to mark them as up to date.
This is nothing new, just this time it was every photo that had ever been published.
Usually when I look back at old folders it's one or two, sometimes a dozen that show up in Modified Photos to Re-Publish.
I was surprised that even photos published earlier that day showed up in the Modified to Re-Publish collection.
That's never happened before.
It had always been photos that had been in folders from previous years that were on hard drives that are now rarely hooked up.

Question 1:
Why does Lr consider just viewing photos that are in a folder as having been modified?

Question 2: (really part of question 1)
Does Lr somehow modify previews or other data when viewing that causes previously published photos to be considered changed enough to warrant re-publishing?

Question 3:
Is there a way to change that Lr behavior?

I'm hoping that this longish post is comprehensible.
It's not an earth shattering problem, but if someone knows a preference that could be modified, that'd be great.

John

 

[clee01l]

Lightroom (at least in v6) marks images to republish IF the metadata has changed. There might be other metadata change taking place besides the metadata that you are seeing.

After the publish collection has completed, then Mark for Republish on ALL image, you should be able to select them and mark them as up to date.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Jeffrey Friedl has a plugin that can mark published images as up to date without having to republish them. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/bag-o-goodies

 

[johngpt]

Thank you both.
I had just waited until the Modified to Re-Publish finished populating, selected all and marked as up to date.
No re-publishing ever took place.

My main question is if there is a setting in Lr which can be utilized to prevent just viewing images from changing metadata so that the Modified to Re-Publish section doesn't keep doing this?
Or for example, within the Lr Publish settings, tick a box that says: "Don't mark photos to re-publish if metadata changes."

I've looked in Publish settings and I've looked through all the Lr preferences and I'm not seeing anything that would seem to help.

 

[clee01l]

Thank you both.
I had just waited until the Modified to Re-Publish finished populating, selected all and marked as up to date.
No re-publishing ever took place.

My main question is if there is a setting in Lr which can be utilized to prevent just viewing images from changing metadata so that the Modified to Re-Publish section doesn't keep doing this?
Or for example, within the Lr Publish settings, tick a box that says: "Don't mark photos to re-publish if metadata changes."

I've looked in Publish settings and I've looked through all the Lr preferences and I'm not seeing anything that would seem to help.

I just had a look at Published services in Lightroom Classic v11. I made changes to metadata for a published image. The image did not get marked for republishing. So some time between LR6 or the later version when I encountered the problem, The publish service modified changes does not get updated. I had to make a minor edit adjustment before the image got flagged for republishing.

So, I have too conclude that there might have been a bug in LR6 since fixed or at some later release, Adobe decided that metadats changes did not warrant republishing.

Since LR6 is in legacy status, your best hope for a solution is to bite the bullet and subscribe.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[johnbeardy]

Publish services can be flaky - it's old code. The plugin author can define which specific fields should trigger the Modified flag, so they might choose some like caption which are supported in the online app and ignore changes to others like location which may not be needed for the project. Develop changes always trigger it.

But I've never felt the detection was 100% reliable and have seen times where a change to one of those fields doesn't trigger the flag for some photos, as if some kind of internal indexing is "stuck", and I've also seen odd behaviours like it happening when you simply select a photo.

So I'd just suggest selecting "mark as up-to-date".

 

[johngpt]

Thanks all.
It's looking like I figured, that there isn't a way to modify the behavior.
I had to ask my question in case there was something easy that I was missing.

Someday I suppose I'll have to purchase a new computer as this old one won't run the new softwares.
And the new computers won't run the old softwares.
So then I'll need to subscribe.

But until then, I'll put up with the occasional filling up of Modified Photos to Re-Publish and continue selecting and marking as up to date.

 

[johnbeardy]

You could try optimizing the catalogue. It clears up crud, and may possibly shake up the indexing. It is a long shot, but a new computer won't do anything to change the behaviour.

 

[prbimages]

You might be interested in this somewhat-related thread. Not version 6, but it shows that there are still "gotchas" even in the latest version.

 

[johngpt]

You might be interested in this somewhat-related thread. Not version 6, but it shows that there are still "gotchas" even in the latest version.

Now that was interesting. One of the respondents mentioned Lr updating its previews or its renderings from previous versions and that had triggered placing previously published photos into the Modified for Re-Publishing.
I'm wondering, since I began with Lr 4 in 2013, if some folders on external hard drives haven't been re-rendered over the two versions of Lr since then.

I'm also hoping that since every single photo that had previously been published got marked to re-publish and then marked as up to date, that this might not happen again to this scale.