P: Photos incorrectly considered as "changed" by republishing and smart collections

I have the same issue. I also noticed that when I zoom in a photo, LR marks that photo as modified.

Adobe please fix it. 

Further to my previous message: Today I turned comments off on SmugMug and that hasn't made any difference either.

I'm also having this problem, and I too have found that it seems to occur when previews are being generated, but not for every single image. Steven Settlemyre's solution didn't work for me either. Please fix it Adobe!

I have the same problem. All collections mitgrate to republish without me changing anything. As others have said it seems to be when LR generates previews.  Steven Settlemyre's suggestion didn't work for me.

Windows 10, Lightroom CC 2015.7

I found this other issue (and solution) that seems to work for this issue as well.

https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family/topics/photos-publish-directly-to-modified-photos-to...

I am having this problem only in the last couple of months. Simply opening an image in the Library module to view it causes it to be marked for republishing.

Im using a rMBP 13" with OSX 10.11.6
Lightroom 2015.7

The same thing happened to me today.  I am working on a batch of 150 to so photos; then suddenly 135 got marked as needing republishing.  They are showing the mysterious "metadata was edited externally" flag.  Now I have to update the links and proofread the whole InDesign book again.

I've checked the edit history on a sample of these and there are no edit steps on the photos since last published.  I have not changed the Publish service itself.  I have not changed any metadata either as far as I know (unless I hit something odd by accident).  No other application has written to these files - they are placed in InDesign but I am not using any other editing application.

Running Lightroom 2015.7, InDesign build 11.4.1.102, MacOS 10.12 on a high spec system with 32GB memory.

I have the same problem. After publishing a smart-collection the number of photos for republish is growing up continuous.
Usually it affects photos which are visible, when I scroll in film-strip or published photos.
It seems as if LR generate new thumbnails or previews.
That's very angry!

I have been experiencing the same problem for years with my Publish to Hard Drive folders.  I have over a dozen smart folders that only include photos that meet certain criteria:  the color of the photo must be Green (this indicates that its editing is final) and the capture date must be in a certain range (a particular calendar year).  This publishes all my final photos for each year into separate folders. I very rarely edit a photo i took years ago, but if i do i go to the smart folder to re-publish the photo.  Usually i find that other photos are in the "modified" category, too, and it's always baffled me but i've never worried about it too much because there were only a few thousand photos in each folder and typically only a few dozen mysteriously marked "modified" photos.

However, i recently changed my setup so i now have one smart folder that publishes ALL of my  "green" photos (30K+) to the hard drive on another PC on my network.  Now the problem is magnified and significant because the "modified" set of pictures is often thousands.  That means when i want to publish any of my new pictures (or ones i've re-edited) I have to publish literally thousands of pictures.  This takes a long time and consumes a lot of CPU, memory, and network bandwidth.

I found a post in an Adobe LR forum in  which a user thought that unchecking "remove person info" would fix this problem but it has not worked for me.

i'm happy to provide more details if it would help.

See Paige's original topic for an extended discussion of his symptoms: Lightroom: Photos spuriously marked as "edited" , which are very similar to the symptoms reported in this topic.