"sidecar file missing" / metadata bug

[ceroni]

This must be a bug in the SQL database concerning metadata. Some of my photos display unexpectedly a “sidecar file missing” warning (I’m not using the option to “automatically write changes to XMP” and I did not write the metadata manually to a sidecar file). Interestingly enough, if one opens the Lr database using SQLiteSpy (got this tip from here) there is no information whatsoever about any xmp sidecar file. In some of the photos it is possible to manually save the xmp file. In some other photos the xmp file never gets written even after many attempts (I’ve got around this by creating an empty xmp file from outside Lr and then overwriting it). The only way I found to get rid of the “sidecar file missing” was to manually (ctrl+s) saving the xmp sidecar file, deleting it from disk and then opening the Lr database with SQLiteSpy and deleting the corresponding xmp field (in AgLibraryFile) from the photos.
There is also a report that the status keeps changing from "Has been changed" to "Up to date".
Has anyone had the same problem? Solutions?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi ceroni, welcome to the forum!

What kind of files are these? And are they definitely missing xmp, or could it be some other kind of sidecar file?

 

[ceroni]

Hi Victoria, thanks for the warm welcoming.
My photos are mainly Canon RAW (.CR2). I'm quite sure the “sidecar file missing” warning wasn't there last week and I didn't touch those photos (other than browsing through the library module). As I mentioned before, with one of the photos I was able to get rid of the warning by saving the sidecar file (xmp format). The other two photos I had to create empty .xmp files before I could save them through Lr. It appears this is definitely a bug. Also, sometime ago I had this same problem with some other photos in another folder and the only way I could eliminate the warning was by opening the Lr catalog using SQLiteSpy and deleting the xmp information attached to the photos.
One last thing: I've first noticed this in Lr 2.4 (the last problem was with 2.5).

 

[pak]

Another problem related to this topic.
I used Geosetter to perform geotagging on directory containing 2'''+ photos (jpg's amd dng's).
Because of some peculiarities of Geosetter, I manipulated the files in this directory with Exiftool.
(These were mainly operations than modified City, Location and Timestamps.)
When Exiftool modifies a picture it preserves the old version by renaming it with the suffix _original (thus to .jpg_original or .dng_original) until I realized that this can be suppressed with the option -overwrite_original.
Because I wanted to verify the result of my manipulations, I did a "read metadata from file" several times in LR, between the various Exiftool invocations.
Finally I deleted all .jpg_original and .dng_original files.

Now LR shows a little questionmark in the top-right of each thumbnail. Hovering over the questionmark says "Sidecar file missing". Clicking on the questionmark opens a window that says: "The following files (related to this photo) were present before, but are now missing", where the file listed as missing is the _original file. Then there is the choice between "Forget" and "Continue to track".

Q1. Why does LR consider the _original file as a sidecar file? It isn't an XMP file but a .dng or .jpg file (containing XMP data) with just an odd extension.

Q2. Is there a quicker way to tell LR to forget about these supposed 'sidecars' than clicking each of the 2''' thumbnail's question marks and choose "forget"?

 

[ceroni]

Hi pak,

- no idea about your Q1, but it appears to be related to the general problem with sidecars and metadata;

- apparently Lr doesn't provide a way for changing this other than clicking on each and every one of thumbnails. From what I've read googling around, the only way for achieving this is using another application (such as SQLiteSpy, see my first post for a link) to directly manipulate the Lr catalog (which is a SQLite database). I've done that with a a dozen or so photos that were displaying the "sidecar file missing".

 

[ceroni]

Just one more thing that could be related:

some of the photos display a "..." for a long time before turning to "Has been changed".

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Yeah, I'd report that if I was you ceroni - something sounds odd.