LR Classic Keyword Blunder

[Jeffrey_Ross]

I am using the most current version of LR on an iMac with MacOS Monterey v. 12.13.1

I was working in a folder of new images and as usual when I have more than one picture of a place, I copy-and-paste keywords between images and then modify as appropriate. I have been doing this for years without a hitch, but today...somehow I must have overwritten all of the keywords of the images prior to those I was working on today.

I suppose I was able to do something that selected all the images and when I pasted from one of the newer images to another, all of the keywords in ALL of the images in the folder were replaced with those new keywords which and of course do not apply to most of the images.

Questions:

1. I have jpgs of all of the files and I can read the keywords and manually cut and paste them back into the original files in LR, but that would take a long time as there are a couple of hundred photos.

I do have current backups of the catalog. Is there a relatively easy way to restore just one folder's keywords? I want to avoid a monumental further blunder by importing an entire catalogue and have something go wrong.

2. Can I restore individual xmp files and have the data imported?

3. Is there a program that would be fast at reading all of the EXIC data including all of the keywords from a jpg file on a Macintosh?

4. Suggestions?

This isn't catastrophic because I can recover the keywords one-by-one, it is just a time consuming effort using the options I currently have. Thanks for any ideas, etc.

[JohanElzenga]

Yes, you can partially restore from a backup. Open the backup catalog in Lightroom, and then select that one folder and choose 'export as catalog'. Do not check the option to include negatives, or any other option. Then import this into your main catalog.

Alternatively, you can select the images in that one folder in the backup catalog and choose 'Metadata - Write metadata to files'. Then open your current catalog again, select the same images and choose 'Read metadata from files'. For this particular problem that's even easier.

[Jeffrey_Ross]

Thank you for your kind response. Can you point me to an article that
explains how to open a backup catalogue in LR? Can a LR catalogue be opened
without it overwriting the most current catalogue?



I don't want to mess things up further than they already are ?

Thank you once again!
--

[ Jeff ]

[dj_paige]

Un-zip the backup catalog, then (in your operating system) double-click on the unzipped catalog file to open it. Then select the folder of interest, and right-click on this folder and select Export this Folder as Catalog.

Then open your regular LrC catalog. In Lightroom Classic, use the menu command File->Import From Another Catalog. Instructions are here: scroll down to "How do I merge two catalogs or import folders from another catalog?".