Participating Frequently

P: Photos are marked for republish even though there is no change.

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
October 25, 2020
112 replies
19974 views

I noticed after updating my new v10 converted catalog that LrC was acting slow in the Library module, so I disengaged the usual culprit for this, the "Automatically write changes into XMP" setting. Then to my dismay, I noticed that it proceeded to mark the majority of the photos in the current grid view as needing a metadata update, even though the catalog metadata was fully saved to XMP prior to the upgrade, as far as I was aware.

Then I paged down, and the pattern repeated: Lightroom scanned all the now-visible photos and found that almost all of them also needed to be updated on disk.

And I did it again. And again.

Eventually I wrote a script to send "Page Down" events to the program periodically to ensure that Lightroom looked at every photo in the catalog, then let it run overnight with the library filter set to "Metadata Status = Up to date", so that it would give me the list of photos that need no metadata update. The next morning, I scrolled the grid back up to the top and let it go again, to catch any photos it missed on the first pass.

In the end, it marked over four-fifths of my catalog as out of date. This beggars belief, since I normally keep "Automatically write changes into XMP" engaged.

Then I did an experiment: I ran exiftool on one of the photos marked as still needing an update, saving the result to a text file, told Lightroom to save the metadata (⌘-S) and ran exiftool on the result, saving the output to a different text file, and diffed the two outputs, and found only timestamp and program version differences!

Observe:

5c5< File Modification Date/Time     : 2020:10:23 18:31:53-06:00---> File Modification Date/Time     : 2020:10:25 10:46:00-06:007c7< File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2020:10:23 18:31:53-06:00---> File Inode Change Date/Time     : 2020:10:25 10:46:00-06:0026c26< Instance ID                     : xmp.iid:9acec219-b6a4-4918-a592-9fc6a0ab3486---> Instance ID                     : xmp.iid:b5e76784-9638-44a1-a8b6-4e17799d003f28c28< Metadata Date                   : 2020:10:23 18:31:53-06:00---> Metadata Date                   : 2020:10:25 10:46-06:0040,41c40,41< History Instance ID             : xmp.iid:eac2ee0b-0b2d-4143-8da1-cafb424d66cc, xmp.iid:9acec219-b6a4-4918-a592-9fc6a0ab3486< History When                    : 2014:04:27 20:29:30-06:00, 2020:10:23 18:31:53-06:00---> History Instance ID             : xmp.iid:eac2ee0b-0b2d-4143-8da1-cafb424d66cc, xmp.iid:b5e76784-9638-44a1-a8b6-4e17799d003f> History When                    : 2014:04:27 20:29:30-06:00, 2020:10:25 10:46-06:00

For that particular file, the "Metadata Date" inside Lightroom is in July of 2019!

You may then wonder why the file modification time in the diff isn't in 2019, but instead two days ago. I dug into a recent pre-upgrade backup of my photos, and indeed, the prior file's mtime was in 2019. So, not only did LrC v10 decide it needed to do a bogus update to the file's metadata, it touched the file prior to actually being told it was okay to do so!

This upgrade has entirely invalidated all of my photo backups. Everything has to be backed up again, all because LrC is being stupid about touching files unnecessarily.

Surely the only defensible case for updating the application version number in the file's XMP metadata is that I've changed the photo, so now the program is properly reporting the last application to update the metadata?

I see other posts in the forum here on related topics, such as complaints that publish services are forcing a re-publish of unchanged photos. I'm posting this because I think I've diagnosed this to a deeper level than most users.

Show previous replies

johnrellis

Legend

"I do regularly edit and make changes to photos and rely on those needing to be republished to know which edits need to actually be re-published."

Before I do a round of edits on already-published photos, I mark all photos as Up-To-Date, do my edits, and then publish. Not very convenient, but it ensures I don't miss re-publishing my edits.

"this happens when new Develop features are added to Lightroom and then these database entries being new on a photo making it appear that theres been a change."

That's definitely been one repeated cause, though I think there are other scenarios as well.

Another issue is that Mark Up-To-Date doesn't "stick" -- yesterday, I had 5000 published photos spuriously indicated as needing publishing, and I marked them all as Up-To-Date. They stayed in that state for at least a couple hours, but today, they all came back as needing publishing.

P

photoliker

Inspiring

While using AnySource is certainly a good way to just clear up all the photos needing republishing, this isn't helpful at all in some workflows. Such as mine where I do regularly edit and make changes to photos and rely on those needing to be republished to know which edits need to actually be re-published.

I've read into this issue for years and I think i've come to the conclusion this happens when new Develop features are added to Lightroom and then these database entries being new on a photo making it appear that theres been a change. At least that's what I recal reading about in other threads at various times.

There has to be a better way to deal with this.

K

Kim Kruse

Participating Frequently

I have the same issue after upgrade to version 13.3. When opening photo for edit, returning to library view shows photo as ready for re-publish, even if not changes where made.

However, new photos from camera Nikon Z6II does not show this wrong behavior.

johnrellis

Legend

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

"This is an absolute maddening bug. Can we get some eyes on this please? Continues to happen in the latest verison."

Indeed, this thread dates to 2020, but there have been issues going back much earlier, and many of us have given up hope. It's not easy to reproduce from scratch, though some of us have offered our catalogs for Adobe to debug.

As a workaround, you can select the photos in a published collection needing to be republished, right-click, and do Mark Up-To-Date. Sometimes that sticks until the next LR update, but often photos start getting marked as needing-to-be-published before then.

The Publish Collections command of the Any Source plugin makes it easy to find and update all such photos at once:

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photoliker

Inspiring

This is an absolute maddening bug. Can we get some eyes on this please? Continues to happen in the latest verison.

aliceinwl

Participating Frequently

I just upgraded to 13.3 and all my photos are getting marked to republish again 😞 It takes hours to generate the 1:1 previews which was the only thing that worked for me last time.

R

robertv47531707

Known Participant

Not only can it happen randomly but it does it for me when viewing a photo(s) when in develop mode. Those that were viewed will be marked for republishing even though nothing was done to them.

e.j.v92227290

Participating Frequently

That's weird. I never had this in the past, then maybe 6 months ago it started to happen here. I also posted about this in this forum. I just realized however that I don't see this erroneous behavior anymore. All is fine again. And thinking back, I don't recall I did anything myself so I think it might have been an update that fixed this for me. But then again, if you still see this happening... (for the record, I'm using LR Classic 13.2 on Win11)

PhilBurton

Inspiring

I wish that Aoobe gave us some visibility into the process of selecting bugs to fix.

Ideally, ideally they would conduct a poll and allow us to vote.. (Should I start a separate thread on this topic?)