P: Lightroom sometimes changes orientation inadvertently

I doubt this is a fix that'd go into 3.x, but if I'm remembering the filesystem details right, an NTFS volume would not hit that specific issue.

Hmm. The metadata logic should figure out that the file didn't really change (the timestamp will just trigger some churn to do the comparison when it isn't really necessary).

TK - no argument. For me so far, just isolated images here or there (and only when looking at them, or maybe even only after explicitly selecting them), but I'm all for having it fixed.

My backup camera doesn't record the orientation information, and I believe this has happened to me as well, but not at the same scale as you.

To further clarify: I didn't have the option of rejecting the loss of the orientation information. LR didn't just flag a conflict and offer me the choice what to do (read the metadata from the file or overwrite it with the catalogue information), it simply went ahead and re-oriented all my portrait orientations into landscape orientation. My camera doesn't record the orientation so all images are "landscape" per default and I guess that's what LR used. I don't know what would have happened if the camera would have recorded the portrait orientation.

Rob, if it affects all the images on my external drive, even if it occurs only once every two years, it would be a major problem. So "infrequent" doesn't really count, AFAIC.

I wonder if this could be the cause of metadata collissions. I often get a message that a photo metadata doesn't match the catalogue even though I hadn't touched the photo outside of LR.

Dan, thanks for your question. My external drive uses the FAT32 format, indeed. It came that way and it didn't occur to me that I should reformat it with NTSF.

It could very well be that the issue I had was daylight saving time change related.

Anything I should do to prevent the loss of orientations to happen again? Reformat the drive? Trust that the LR bug will be fixed before the next DST change?

Is your external drive formatted as FAT32? There's some strange date related behaviors where the apparent filesystem metadata shifts based on time zone and daylight savings time changes. I got bit by that recently with rsync, which re-synced a bunch of files because their times were an hour different than the previous sync.

My own external drive is FAT32 because I share it between Linux, Mac, and Windows systems and I've had occasional cases exactly as you describe here.

I think I've been bitten by this big time (-> "Photo Orientation Lost in Lightroom").

For reasons unbeknown to me all the images on an external drive were suddenly deemed to be "externally modified" (I never touch the images with anything else but LR). Needless to say it was a big hassle to redo all orientations.

s'cool. I don't consider it a high priority item, since it is infrequent, but 'twould be nice to have it fixed... I appreciate the response.