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I somehow lost links to my photos in a collection. So I clicked on the ! in the upper right and went to Locate them on my hard drive. Usually after doing this all the !'s go away and the photos are relinked. Not so this time. I got a message saying the "metadata for this photo has been changed by both Lightroom and another application. Import settings from disk or overwrite settings with those from the catalog?" Not knowing which to choose I chose the first and the image disappeared from the collection. I tried another and chose the 2nd, and the ! went away but only for that image. Why is this happening and since neither option is relinking all my images what can i do to achieve that? Thanks.
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This choice is all about writing Metadata to the files in your Catalog AFTER some changes have been made outside Lightroom.
Your choice will depend where you have done that: could illustrate that for us?
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Thanks. Well I edited these images in Photoshop but I do that to all my images. Regardless usually the images in a LR Collection can be accessed as long as they were not moved from their original location.
I'm not sure sure how I would "illustrate" "where" I have worked on these images. The shoot was last August, it was complicated and I left off working on it till now. I don't know that I could retrace my steps. Now the images are all grayed out in LR because they have already been imported, but they can't be found.
I wish I understood what was going on here. Did I (likely) make edits in Photoshop which has resulted in LR making this query? But I edit images in Photoshop all the time. This is confusing.
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If you edit in photoshop from straight from Lightroom it is not supposed to give this problem (Crtl/CMD +E). If you are in photoshop and open the images without coming from Lightroom then this conflict is a normal one. You write that you have the problem inside of the collection. did you try to relink there or did you go to the folder? This because in a collection can be images from different folders together and it can only find images in the same folder, normally.
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Thank you. Here is some additional information in case it provides a clue to what happened. When they were imported I gave the images star ratings. Only the images with star ratings have the ! in the upper right. The others do not and can be accessed in the Develop module. This is true inside the Collection and when I navigate to the folder on my computer in LR where the images are stored.
The star-rated images give the same message in both the Collection and in the folder when the ! is clicked on: "The metadata for this image has been changed by both Lightroom and another application" etc. Does this behavior suggest what might have happened? I don't know enough to guess and I can't remember what I did.
Also, since this is the prompt I get when clicking on the images, and no other, it appears I have only 2 options: import from disk or overwrite settings. If I import from disk, am I restoring the camera RAW values to the images as they exist inside Lightroom? If I don't, what am I doing (what does overwrite settings mean)? Thank you.
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So, when you edited in Photoshop, you added star ratings to the images? That would be the metadata that changed. And the change is in the metadata actually imbedded in the image file, as opposed to in the Lightroom database record of the file, hence the metadata conflict.
But, why does that remove the image from a non smart collection?
Q1) Just to make sure, you added the images to the collection by dragging them into the collection, correct?
Q2) And the file name did not change, correct?
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Thank you. No, I added the star ratings in LR. I do my initial review of images and rate them in LR and export them as DNG files; then I open them from bridge and sometimes make corrections in Camera Raw and then open them in PS or just open them straightaway in PS.
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bartonlew wrote
Thank you. Here is some additional information in case it provides a clue to what happened. When they were imported I gave the images star ratings. Only the images with star ratings have the ! in the upper right. The others do not and can be accessed in the Develop module. This is true inside the Collection and when I navigate to the folder on my computer in LR where the images are stored.
The star-rated images give the same message in both the Collection and in the folder when the ! is clicked on: "The metadata for this image has been changed by both Lightroom and another application" etc. Does this behavior suggest what might have happened? I don't know enough to guess and I can't remember what I did.
Also, since this is the prompt I get when clicking on the images, and no other, it appears I have only 2 options: import from disk or overwrite settings. If I import from disk, am I restoring the camera RAW values to the images as they exist inside Lightroom? If I don't, what am I doing (what does overwrite settings mean)? Thank you.
Images that have a Exclamation Mark ( ! ) on them are Missing images.
The icon for images that have metadata conflicts is this one.
This is on Windows but I think it is the same for Mac OS X.
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So, I assume that the Collection is a smart one? Some field in the metadata used to select what goes in the collection? And that value got altered somehow.
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Nope, it's not a Smart Collection.
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Actually, rethinking this, the proper question, is why Lightroom lost linkage to where the files were located, not so much about metadata change (unless the metadata change is file name or location)
Q1) When you finish editing in PS, how are you closing the file, simple close, or a save? Saving to same location, saving to same name? Using save as opposed to close can be problematic in the LR to PS back to LR workflow.
Q2) And these are raster not RAW files, correct?
And do you perhaps have a hard drive starting to fail?
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Lightroom uses the inode number (Mac or Linux, but must be similar in MS-Windows) to know if the file is the same as before. A new file having the same name and extenssion will have a different inode, so it is a different picture or video for Lightroom. For instance, if you use exiftool to update a date-time in the file, exiftool creates a copy (different inode) of the original and rename the original file, so both files are disconnected from Lighroom. If you use exiftool option -overwrite_original it still updates a copy, but if you use -overwrite_original_in_place, it updates the original file and maintains the inode. I am currently doing such updates for fixing videos' CreateDates and MediaCreateDate, but now I am facing a different but related problem: Lightroom fails to update its catalog when I click on the "Metadata Status" three-lines and ask which one to update. It does detects that there is a change in the metadata. I click on "Import Settings from Disk", it does not complain but it does not update the dates from disk; and if I click on the "Metadata Status" three-lines again, it pops up the window asking again but it does nothing. The only way seems to be to delete the image or video ONLY from the catalog and ask Lightroom to "Syncronize" the folder.