Edits are gone after trying to fix metadata conflict

[Tomas5FBD]

Hi to everyone! I work with Lightroom Classic, and ran into a trouble with my edits. I noticed an icon on right top corner of my edits, that said smth like "this file has metadata conflict". Not sure why this happened (I put some edits into Collections, which I saved), but going further and clicking on that icon it gave me 3 options, of which I chose the first on from the left (said smth like "going to the original folder"). Just like that, all my work done on photos, all my edits are gone and I'm stuck, trying to figure out, if thre is an option to recover my work. 

Appreciate your help. 

[richardplondon · Accepted solution]

Your previous editing should be still retrievable from Lightroom Classic's History panel.

Just click on the prior edit step, immediately below the record of your loading in this different metadata over the top.

What's happened here, is that the LR Classic Catalog normally holds your editing metadata (as well as a History of your previous edits). But additionally, it is possible to write a duplicate copy of these edits externally, to the file on disk. This is so that other programs (such as Bridge) if used, could access that information - since these other programs cannot access your live edits inside the LR Classic Catalog. Conversely, if another program were to change this external metadata somehow, the effect of that would not be seen inside the Catalog.

So LrC lets you know when something changes externally, that it's available to be loaded into the Catalog (over the top of what's there now). Also when something changes internally, it lets you know that it's available to be written out (over the top of what's there now). This does not mean you HAVE to do either of these things - it may be undesirable to do so.

If you load external metadata in, your image inside LR changes to reflect this different editing (and keywords, etc... whatever) that you've just told it to adopt. But it also remembers that it's done so, plus it remembers what the image was previously like and lets you return to that. External programs such as Bridge / ACR, when relying only on the metadata that's currently present, cannot do that. When that is overwritten, whatever was previously there is not recoverable (unless you have a disk backup to revert to).

[Tomas5FBD]

Richard, huge thanks. Spent 2 hours goping through my edits, but your advice worked!!!

[richardplondon]

You are most welcome! History is such a good feature, IMO.

(it would certainly be more convenient if we could roll back edit steps controllably for many images together, rather than working one at a time - but at least the work is now recovered)