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Paolo0D44
Participant
June 23, 2025
Question

Read metadata on unmodified photos causes profile to change

  • June 23, 2025
  • 2 replies
  • 218 views

Hi everyone,

I have a catalogue of around 200k photos.

I am in the process of changing the names of the photos following a unified naming scheme that I have decided.

 

To perform this operation, in LrC, I first force a save of all metadata of the existing photos. To generate the xmp files for all of them. Then I am using a script calling exiftool to put the new name into a specific metadata. Then, in LrC, I need to bulk read the metadata for all the photos of a certain event. Then, again from LrC, using the rename function I can transfer the name I want from the metadata to the filename. This process works just fine.

 

However, after a while, I discover that all the pictures I didn't modified, after the metadata read, have a new step in their history named "Reset settings" and this step includes an unexpected profile change from let say "Camera Neutral" to "Adobe Color", and as consequence also the color changed accordingly.

 

Photos with some kind of existing modifications, such as changes in exposure or highlights are unaffected by this change, the import profile is maintained.

 

My question is: is this behavior something I should expect? Manually switching back to the previous profile by removing the unwanted step seems to be possible only with one by one editing.

 

Thanks.

 

2 replies

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
June 24, 2025

"Manually switching back to the previous profile by removing the unwanted step seems to be possible only with one by one editing."

 

You could us Copy/Sync Settings to copy the profile from a photo that has the right one to the photos that have the wrong one. 

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
June 24, 2025

For the problem photos, verify that Metadata > Save Metadata To File has actually created a .xmp file. In past versions of LR, sometimes it didn't create .xmp files for photos that didn't have any changes. 

P
Paolo0D44Author
Participant
June 24, 2025

I checked that, and the xmp are and we're present.

It looks like they are treated in a different ways when there are some edits and not. I would expect that even actually resetting settings it should apply the profile assigned in settings (like camera defaults). 

johnrellis
johnrellis
Legend
June 26, 2025

Based on my long experience in dealing with such metadata issues, I think the only practical way to troubleshoot this and possibly file a bug report is to create a self-contained test catalog. Select one or two of the problem photos and do File > Export As Catalog with the options Export Selected Photos Only and Export Negative Files.  Then compress the catalog folder (which contains the problem photos) as a zip file.  After making the zip file, verify in the catalog folder that doing Metadata > Save Metadata To File followed by Metadata > Read Metadata From File cases the assigned profile to change.  Also, if you've set Camera Raw defaults, post a screenshot of Preferences > Presets showing those defaults.


With that sample catalog, I can verify that the problem occurs on other installations and we can figure out if a bug report should be filed.   

 

(Adobe generally doesn't pay attention to problem reports unless you can provide them an easy way to reproduce the problem.)

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