Metadata disappears after input

[henningmet]

Recently, I have discovered a strange behaviour of Lightroom when entering metadata.
I am in the library view/grid view and have selected several images. If I then write something in the metadata (e.g. caption), it is displayed briefly and then disappears again. Only when I manually trigger "Read metadata from file" is it displayed again.

"Selected photos" is ticked and the little eye symbol next to the metadata field.

I didn't have this behaviour until a few weeks ago. What am I doing wrong?

Windows 11, Lightroom Classic 13.

[John R Ellis · Accepted solution]

1.  Try deleting the Helper.lrdata folder:

a) Do Catalog Settings > General > Show to open Finder / File Explorer on the current catalog folder.
b) Exit LR.
c) In that folder, delete the folder "<catalog> Helper.lrdata".
d) Restart LR, and it will rebuild the folder.

The Helper.lrdata folder caches information about metadata, keywords, folders, collections, and other things to speed the performance of LR and it can sometimes get corrupted. In recent versions, LR has used it more heavily to improve the speed of displaying metadata, and there have been a fair number of bugs with it.

2. Try resetting LR's preferences:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/articles-page/how-do-i-reset-lightrooms-preferences/

LR sometimes soils its preferences file, and resetting it can fix all sorts of wonky behavior. That article explains how to restore the old preferences if resetting doesn't help.

[henningmet]

Hi John,

Thank you for your advice. I had already tried to reset LR's preferences and that didn't work.

But then I tried your first possible solution and let Lightroom rebuild the  "<catalog> Helper.lrdata"-file. That fixed the problem. Learnt something new again. Thanks for that, I really appreciate that!

I am long-time Lightroom user (since Lightroom 3) and use it heavily almost every day but there is always something new to discover ...

[John R Ellis]

Glad you got it resolved.

[MJ226021310237]

I tried both deleting the preferences and Helper.lrdata and restarting the app. I still have the same problem. The captions disappear after you enter them and move to another photo and back. My catalog is on an external harddisk. Could that be the problem? And if so, how do I resolve this?

[John R Ellis]

[This post contains formatting and embedded images that don't appear in email. View the post in your Web browser.]

@MJ226021310237, look in the corner of the Metadata panel. If there's an icon that looks like a rectangle with a sawed-off corner, click it so that it changes to an Egyptian hieroglyphic eyeball:

When it's the rectangle-with-sawed-off corner, you're in Edit Only Mode, a bizarre feature LR introduce a while ago that Adobe thinks helps some people.