P: Lightroom 14.1 & 14.1.1 stops showing metadata after 5 to 10min of work spinning wheel

This issue persists for me through version 14.4.  I roll back to 14.01 and metadata behaves as it should.  Has anyone found a solution?

Recently swapped from an old PC to a Mac Mini - generally LR(classic) and PS run well and after importing photos I can add and edit keywodrds as normal. When I go to the develop module, make changes and reurn to the Library and the keywords space is blanked but for a greyed 'working' message.

If I close LR and restart it - all is well and my previously entered keywords are visible and editable.

Not every time - but often enough for me to ask about it.

Lightroom Classic version: 14.3.1 [ 202505061331-b063faef ]
License: Creative Cloud
Language setting: en-GB
Operating system: Mac OS 15
Version: 15.5.0 [24F74]

I updated Lightroom Classic to version 14.3, but this issue persisted.

For me, this is now fixed in LRC 14.2.

No amount of deleting prefereences, deleting "Helper.lrdata", reseting anything worked in 14.1.1, so very happy 14.2 fixed it for me.

@Astonished_Penguin5ED0,

There are two workarounds that may help with your symptoms:

1. Try deleting the Helper.lrdata folder:

a) Do Catalog Settings > General > Show to open Finder / File Explorer on the current catalog folder.
b) Exit LR.
c) In that folder, delete the folder "<catalog> Helper.lrdata".
d) Restart LR, and it will rebuild the folder.

The Helper.lrdata folder caches information about metadata, keywords, folders, collections, and other things to speed the performance of LR and it can sometimes get corrupted. In recent versions, LR has used it more heavily to improve the speed of displaying metadata, and there have been a fair number of bugs with it.

2. For others in this thread, and especially if you see a spinning wheel, deleting the Helper.lrdata doesn't help, but rolling back to LR 14.0.1 does help.

Thanks for the update.  I searched and didn't realize it was already reported.

Lightroom Classic 14.2 has been released, but this issue is still there. 😞

Hello,

When using copy as DNG on import, metadata is not visible in the library module anywhere following processing.  Pressing 'i' when in loupe view does not show any info in the upper left.  Metadata panel also shows no data and you get a circle.  Keywording also shows "working" for no reason.  Histogram is also blank.  The only solution is to close and restart lightroom.  Once the system is in this state, no photos in the catalog (even those that are not part of the import) exhibit this behavior.

This has been happening since at least the prior version as well as the current one (14.2).

I'm on macOS 15.1 and LrC 14.1.1.

I have changed my mind a bit with regards to this issue.  It seems it is new.  I am hitting the spinnning dots in the Metadata panel much more often and I am not even aware of what I'm doing to trigger it.  I just notice that the dots are spinning.  I left it alone spinning now for two hours and it never recovered so it doesn't seem to be just slow at recovering or something like that.  Something is definitely wedged.

I was asked to add my experience to this report.  I'm on a Mac (15.2) so this might be different.

I was in grid view and selected over 2000 images.  Most of these were raw images but there also some video files in the mix.  In the Metadata panel, on the left side is a spinner.  It started spinning and I waited for 15 to 30 seconds.  Then I decided to just select one image to see if the spinner would stop.  It did not.  And, after that point, the Metadata panel was useless.  To fix it I would exit LrC and start it back up.

In the morning, it seemed that the issue was hard to avoid.  I tested different sizes of selections, with and without videos, from the local disk or a remotely mounted disk, etc.  My very speculative conclusing was that it had something to do with video files.  But then later in the afternoon, I couldn't reproduce the problem at all.  When I selected a large group of images, the spinner would spin for less than 5 seconds, stop, and reveal the results.

I hope this helps.