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misxif
Participant
June 20, 2026
Question

Lightroom Classic v15.3 on Mac OS Tahoe: importing a photo file which includes a | (pipe) symbol in dc_subject metadata causes Lightroom to hang with 100% CPU usage.

  • June 20, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 12 views

Lightroom Classiv v15.3 (on Mac OS Tahoe) has a problem importing photo files that have a pipe symbol - a | symbol - in the XMP field dc:subject.

Lightroom apparently has a problem interpreting the pipe symbol, and then hangs, seemingly indefinitely until the import is cancelled, while showing a high level of CPU usage. This hanging seems to take place at the end of the import process for this photo.

The pipe symbol is used by Lightroom to separate levels in the keyword hierarchy within the Hierarchical Subject XMP field.  Having pipe symbols also within the keywords doesn’t seem to be a problem with the Hierarchical Subject field - at least it doesn’t interfere with importing.  Also the pipe symbols in the Weighted Flat Subject field don’t seem to cause a problem with imports.

Attached is a sample file that hangs when being imported into Lightroom.  Of course, a problem file causes a batch import of photos to fail, with some number of files correctly importing until Lightroom does to process a problem file.

I have tested with various other programs that import photos with their metadata, and they do not have the same problem as Lightroom.

As a historical note, the saving of the pipe symbols in the dc:subject field was done by an earlier version of Lightroom, perhaps related to addition of keyboard hierarchies that contained empty keywords.

    1 reply

    johnrellis
    Legend
    June 23, 2026

    Unfortunately, the format converts attached JPEGs to Webp format and discards the metadata. If you can convert the file to DNG format and the problem still occurs, then attach the DNG. Otherwise, upload it to Wetransfer, Dropbox, Google Drive or similar free service and post the sharing link here.

    misxif
    misxifAuthor
    Participant
    June 23, 2026

    Hello John, thanks for the tip.

    Here is a link to the photo: https://e.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZB0ncZD8RkUBj5f4mcfEVg6qFlwYGPNx9y


    FYI, I have confirmed that Lightroom importing does not have a problem with other somewhat strange characters in the keywords of my photos, only with the pipe symbol (as far as I have seen).  The photo I am posting imports without problems when the keywords containing pipe symbols are removed.  This was also true with around 30 other photos within a large batch of photos being imported.