FIXED: "Error writing metadata" on random files on Windows 11

Hi all, I'm sharing this here in case anyone else has the issue I just had. Bridge either crashed or I force-quit it while it was in the middle of a metadata operation, and after that it refused to write metadata to some random files. After some investigation, I found that I couldn't write metadata to the associated XMP files with any program. 

The problem is that Bridge marks the files as read-only while it's working on them, but doesn't unmark them when it's forcibly killed. This flag moves with the file, so copying the file or moving it to another drive doesn't fix the problem.

My solution (Windows 10/11):

1. Open the Command Prompt
2. Run the command, with <path> replaced with the path to the folder containing your files.

attrib -r "<path>" /S /D​

-r removes the read-only flag, /S applies this to all subdirectories, and /D applies this to folders as well. 

There's likely a similar solution on mac but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Hope this helps! 🙂