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PROBLEM: Metadata file needs to be updated flags appears on all photos after import from another catalog

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dominique.gascon

dominique.gascon

Member
Joined
Dec 20, 2020
Messages
31
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
10.11 release Camera Raw 13.1
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I combined many small catalogs into one by importing them into a new blank catalog (to respect the recommendation to use one instead of multiples catalogs).

Everything went smoothly, albeit slowly, and I have now one large catalog with 27K pictures. Two of the oldest catalogs caused an error while importing at the keyword stage, keyword fields were missing after import - everything else was fine. I solved this by exporting the metadata from the original catalog into .XMP files and re importing into the new catalog (the history shows now an entry "from metadata", but the photos are unaltered, and the keywords are visible).

Now that I have finished, I notice that all the photos (except recent ones that I have not yet edited and which have no ITPC data) have a flag "Metadata file needs to be updated" and no matter what I do, the flag remains. The flags do not appear in the original catalog.
1) Following the instructions of Lightroom when clicking on the flag does not fix the issue.
2) I imported the catalog into a new one, but the flags are still there in the new one.
3) Writing the metadata to .XMP (the option is not turned on) and re-importing, as it was suggested in another thread by our very own Queen, had rather disastrous results, (thank god on a copy of the catalog), all develop settings were reset (they could be corrected manually in the history, but not on 27000 of them).

before, posting this, I made a last attempt by turning on the "Save metadata to XML file" option and Lightroom dutifully created 20000 plus XML file without correcting the problem. Surprisingly, files which had a red label do not display the flag. I am am lost.

It is not a major issue, but definitively annoying. Any idea.

Thanks.
 
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Problem fixed but issue still unresolved.

This morning after a Windows update and obligatory reboot, I tried again on the first photo in the catalog to update the file metadata, and it worked! I try on several successive groups of increasing length and the flags disappeared until I did about 200 photos. Then the flags in the next one had also disappeared by miracle.

I don't understand what happened. I tried many time to do exactly the same manoeuvre whitout success. While waiting for an answer, I cleaned up the keywords that had diverged by deleting, moving and renaming. The only thing that I can think off, and it is a wild guess, is that by doing so, I deleted a corrupt field which was preventing Lightroom to correctly update or report.
 
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Thanks for the info; nothing about this turned up on Google or on this forum with the keywords I used. It was frustrating. I suspect it had to do with corrupt data in Keywords. Two catalogs did not import the keywords (causing an error message) and I found two "hidden" keywords, not visible in the keyword list, but exported by Lightroom.
 
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Just for info, not fixed in 10.2 even though release notes suggested that it was and regardless of whehter or not the images were imported from another catalog or not. "Save Metadata to disk" only clears "metadata status" for a bout half of the images that are showing the icon in the grid (in my experience). This goes for DNG's, JPG's, and CR2's that I know of. There have been some threads trying to ferret out the circumstances that cause this (e.g. cropping, or this one pointing to importing from another catalog) but the bottom line is that the "Save Metadata to disk" does not clear the flag and a large number of cases as it should.

In some cases (not all) "read metadata from file" after "saving metadata to file" clears the status, but again it is inconsistent. Maybe I missed it somewhere (I have not been keeping up on these threads due to increased workload) - so if there is a viable work around or we have a verified "circumstance" that causes this problem, please let me know.

But at this point - still a bug IMHO

Dan.
 
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Califdan said:
"Save Metadata to disk" only clears "metadata status" for a bout half of the images that are showing the icon in the grid (in my experience).
Click to expand...
That bug report is marked "Acknowledged", so it's still open internally in the development team.
 
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