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

[Dr. Fred Mbogo]

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In the end, it marked over four-fifths of my catalog as out of date.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.

[Jao vdL]

This bug has been driving me up a wall for years. Every time an update comes out images at random pop up to be republished and yes even the images that are currently being published will do this. This has been going on for years and is not new to this version.

[Schmidtze]

@Jao vdL It IS new that files already during export immediately slip back into changed ones. At least for me. I export a lot, I haven't had this behavior before.

[Jao vdL]

seen it many times before unfortunately. Could be that the update made it much worse though but hard for me to tell. It's also always been incredibly slow to publish folders with more than a few images in them. When updating publish folders the whole app becomes unresponsive. Also been that way for a long time and as far as I can tell just really bad programming. 

[johnrellis]

Moderators, @Rikk Flohr: Photography, please merge with the existing bug:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-bugs/p-photos-are-marked-for-republish-even-though-...

[Schmidtze]

But please note that this problem is new for export!
I have Publish Collections with over 70,000 image files. In them, the files have been re-marked for a republish several times in the last few days. And, very important, this happens during the export itself! The progress bar during the export always jumps back a bit, this is new!

And before the actual republish process starts, that is, before image files are actually created, it takes forever! Several minutes in some cases. That is also new.

Unfortunately, I have the impression that Adobe has tested very very badly. I am a software developer myself and have a lot to do with test automation. All this can be wonderfully automated, the testing of all these processes. And please not with 500 image files but with many thousands...

[johnrellis]

"But please note that this problem is new for export!"

Every major release, there seems to be a new twist to the symptoms.

Sounds like you have a lot of published collections. You might check out the Publish Collections command of the Any Source plugin, which makes it much easier to find photos and collections that need republishing, mark them as up-to-date, or republish the collections in parallel to slow publish services.

[kimaldis]

I see this is still happening. Driving me nuts

[robertv47531707]

And all Adobe does is ignore it. Or is it too difficult for the engineer(s)
to fix?

[PhilBurton]

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?)

[e.j.v92227290]

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)

[robertv47531707]

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.