Date: 2023-01-17
MacOS Sonoma 14.1.2
Lightroom Classic (LrC) 13.1
MacBook Pro M1 Max
Seagate Portable 5TB External Hard Drive Archival Storage
Greetings Adobaphiles!
I’ve had recurring consistency issues with LrC Synchronize Folder over several versions, but this latest is a doozy.
I’ve used LrC for many years and have 42K+ images in my LrC Catalog on an external 5TB Seagate drive, organized hierarchically under APFS. I NEVER manage this hierarchy or these folders outside LrC, so LrC is always the source of any changes, e.g., folder creation, renaming, moves, and so forth.
I occasionally perform a sort of Catalog “validity check” by selecting a folder in the hierarchy and applying LrC Synchronize Folder. I did this recently and noticed several inconsistencies across a few folders, so I popped up to the top level of the hierarchy and tried Synchronize Folder there.
Alas, LrC reported nearly a thousand “new” archival photos, all of them previously imported and cataloged many moons ago. I was bereft, but I summoned up my courage (or carelessness) and reimported all the so-called “new” images. In hindsight, I probably should have restarted LrC and tried Synchronize Folder once more on the off-chance the issue was simply a runtime anomaly, but the deed’s been done, and I don’t have the fortitude to crawl back through my LrC Catalog backups to try and find where and how the issue may have otherwise arisen, especially since I had recently moved a year’s worth of LrC cataloged folders and photos from my internal "production" HD to my external archive, all via LrC of course, which might well be where and how the program somehow failed me.
Fortunately (I hope), I had previously enabled the LrC Catalog options
Include Develop settings in metadata inside JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and PSD files
and
Automatically write changes into XMP
so I hopefully haven’t lost image edits as well, though I did lose Names for over 2,000 faces I had previously (and laboriously) identified and applied.
Setting aside the aforementioned possibility of a runtime anomaly, these questions come to mind…
1: Have I misunderstood how Synchronize Folder works? I’ve used it successfully in the past when I added or edited images outside LR.
2: Have you had comparable issues with Synchronize Folder? Would you be willing to run it against your some or all of your catalog to see if it misbehaves?
3: Have you come across other discussions related to this issue that I may have missed in my search?
Thanks for any reconnaissance you might be able to provide.
Michael
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