Library module Two bugs in Lr 11.3?

[dianemiller]

Lightroom Version Number

11.3

Operating System

1. macOS 12 Monterey

Apologies if this has been posted -- I can't find a search function.

Mac M1, Monterey, 12.2.1. I went from Lr 11.2 back to 11.1 due to the publication bug. Now have gone to 11.3 and publishing (to prior Smugmug galleries) works but takes two passes!! (And all my galleries now show that they need to be published.)

Also, when I make a new folder on my Drobo, from Lr, it shows it with a ? and finding it fails. But after a Lr restart, the new folder shows.

Will update the OS to 12.3.1, but wanted to catch up as much as possible first.

 

[dianemiller]

Correction about the galleries -- MANY need to be re-published but not all. Some of those that need to be re-published have not had any images added or removed since Lr 12.2. Most that do need to be re-published need 2 passes with much writing of files to the Drobo where they are stored, but some publish in one pass, although with a lot of disk activity, while some publish very quickly. This may be due to damage rendered by publishing attempts in Lr 12.2?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Publishing services that show images that need to be republished for no apparent reason is a very old bug. Adobe is aware of it but they either don’t know how to fix it or they have given it a very low priority.

 

[RikkFlohr]

Publishing services that show images that need to be republished for no apparent reason is a very old bug. Adobe is aware of it but they either don’t know how to fix it or they have given it a very low priority.

It looks like that bug report was lost in the forum migration. I have located the bug and the migrated thread in the Community Forum and cross-referenced them. See: https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...even-though-there-is-no-change/idi-p/12664410

 

[BobT]

Publishing services that show images that need to be republished for no apparent reason is a very old bug. Adobe is aware of it but they either don’t know how to fix it or they have given it a very low priority.

I've always taken that to mean that the slightest metadata change somewhere, such as a file structure change of a drive letter change, would mark a file as having changed and trigger the publishing service to republish the image. It's a pain but not sure if it can or should be avoided.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

I've always taken that to mean that the slightest metadata change somewhere, such as a file structure change of a drive letter change, would mark a file as having changed and trigger the publishing service to republish the image. It's a pain but not sure if it can or should be avoided.

No, it's not that. Images that have not been touched or changed in any way (and Macs do not use drive letters) suddenly are flagged as having to be republished, while other images in the same folder structure do not. One thing that appears to trigger this is simply looking at such an image (even if only in the grid). If Lightroom updates the preview for any reason, it will often also trigger the republish. I have seen it also for images that I had not viewed for ages as far as I can tell.

 

[johnrellis]

To build on Johan's comments about spurious marking of published photos as "modified", Adobe has decided not to address one set of causes of this problem.

When a new version of LR adds new develop settings (e.g. the Guided Upright Tool in LR 2015.6) or changes the internal catalog representation of existing settings (e.g. brush, linear, and radial masks in LR 11), the catalog upgrade process doesn't change all the photos at once. Rather, as LR re-renders photos, the develop settings will be changed on the fly. When LR eventually changes the internal representation of the settings, it compares the new representation with the old and declares that the photo has "changed" and marks the photo as "modified", needing republishing.

So as you scroll through Library, you might occasionally stumble across a photo whose thumbnail isn't in the preview cache, so LR will re-render it, triggering the "modified". Ditto if you zoom Loupe to 100% and the 100% preview isn't in the cache.

Obviously, this catalog upgrade process, which changes the internal catalog representation, shouldn't trigger a "modified", since by design it's not supposed to change the visual representation of photos. More precisely, LR and Camera Raw provide the ironclad promise that a photo will always render the same visually even after multiple application upgrades -- that's why we shouldn't have to worry about archiving JPEG renderings of our photos.

When the Guided Upright Tool was added in LR 2015.6, according to employee Rick Spaulding, Adobe explicitly decided not to address the spurious "modifieds": "Due to it’s obscure nature and that a solid workaround has been discovered we will not be expending any time or resources to fix it. It will only affect those users who are planning to migrate from a version <6.6 to a version >= 6.6 so that number is extremely small."

When the wonderful new Masking Tool was added in LR 11.0, employee Rikk Flohr queried the product team whether it was desired behavior that published photos would be marked as "modified". There wasn't a follow up with their answer, and the bug report remains in Discussions (i.e. not officially acknowledged and logged in their internal bug tracking).

You could easily work around previous instances of this bug by selecting all the modified photos in a published collection, right-clicking, and doing Mark As Up-To-Date. Unfortunately, that doesn't work with the LR 11 instance -- photos marked as up-to-date will rise from the dead and remark themselves as "modified" sometime later.

The only reliable workaround for LR 11 is to first rebuild all the Library previews (to force a re-rendering) and then republish all the photos spuriously marked as modified (I've got several hundred published collections containing over 15K photos). The Publish Collections command of the Any Source plugin makes it easier to find and re-publish these photos.

Bug threads:
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...blishing-and-smart-collections/idi-p/12250355
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...otos-to-re-publish-for-no-reason/m-p/12690169

 

[Johan Elzenga]

What does work is use Jeffrey Friedl’s “Bag-O-Goodies” plugin. It has an option to mark a publishing service as up to date. http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/bag-o-goodies

 

[johnrellis]

"What does work is use Jeffrey Friedl’s “Bag-O-Goodies” plugin. It has an option to mark a publishing service as up to date."

For many of us, that will only work temporarily -- some or all of the photos marked as up-to-date will get re-marked as modified, some immediately and some not for many days later. The plugin uses the same internal API as the Mark Up-To-Date command.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Yeah, it probably depends on why the image was flagged in the first place. I have good results with this plugin, but I do see the problem come up again every now and then. I never checked whether it’s the same images or different ones, however.