Metadata issue

[Alan Skyrme]

LR recently upgraded and my catalog was transferred to a new vesrion (2).

Since then I have had numerous issues re;ating to metadata. Various images have a notation with a message " The metadata for this photo has been changed by another application. Should Lightroom import settings from disk or overwrite disk settings with those from the catalog.

1. I import all images to LR using LR.

2. I never make changes to files or folders using anything but LR.

Why would this happen. It really has messed up my catalogue .... duplicated versions of images, one with one colour code (eg green) another with yellow for example. I never know whether to overwrite or import because I have no idea what metadata has changed ... not obvious when I look.

Any ideas?

[JohanElzenga]

Either ignore this completely (you can turn off this warning in the view options) or overwrite the metadata on disk with the Lightroom catalog settings.

[Alan Skyrme · Accepted solution]

Just spent 2 hours correcting my folders - seems to be stable now though there are some images that still have the metadata warning. These are not keepers so will be deleted anyway.

I found that if I overwrote one of the two versions of the image that appeared then both (identical file names but NOT showing as virtual copies at all) and then deleted one (from catalog rather than from disk ... I tried deleting from disk and lost both images!!), then both images disappeared. When I synced to bring back one of the images there was only one image to sync, not two.

Long-winded workaround but would like to know what was causing the situation - NOT operator error!!! 🙂

Matter resolved

[johnrellis]

Long-winded workaround but would like to know what was causing the situation - NOT operator error!!! 🙂

Every major version of LR has sometimes generated these spurious warnings, unfortunately, and Adobe has never fixed it.

[Just Shoot Me]

Do you use any backup program for backing up your image files. Could be that backup program is writing something to the file that LR is seeing as it being changed.

[Laura Shoe]

I used to recommend to everyone to turn on "Automatically write changes to XMP" in Catalog Settings, figuring that this XMP save is a great extra backup of work (though not a complete one). I have stopped recommending it for most people though, and these confusing and annoying messages are one of the primary reasons (not to mention that it can also bog LR down).

IMO since you're not working with any other programs (like Bridge), as long as you back up your catalog frequently, and either your catalog backups are saved to a different drive or you back up your drive regularly, you don't need to save to XMP.  If you're not saving to XMP, you won't get the warning. As Johan mentioned, you can also turn off the warning: go into View>View Options, and uncheck "Unsaved Metadata".