Import not reading XMP face regions consistently

[abbeyroad71]

I recently reorganized the folder structure of my master catalog. As part of this process, I've created a new Lightroom catalog. As the newly-reorganized photos were importing into Lightroom, I started to notice that some photos randomly lost the face regions that had been created previously within Lightroom and written directly into the JPG files. The people tag keywords were still there, but the face regions were missing.

The regions were all created with Lightroom classic, and using a separate program (XnView) I am able to see the face region coordinates in the XMP section of the JPG file. So it appears to me that Lightroom wrote out the data correctly in the original catalog, but isn't reading it back in when the same files are imported into the new catalog.

This is definitely an intermittent problem, as I will have dozens of photos in a folder that will be just fine, while others are missing the face regions.

I've tried writing out all the metadata again using the old catalog (right-click a folder > Save Metadata), the timestamps on the files update as expected, and again I can see the face regions in XnView, but when I try to import the photos back into a new catalog the same problem occurs.

My concern now is that I have no way of knowing whether the face regions are actually being written properly to the JPG file or not. My workflow is based on the "truth is in the file" concept - all metadata is written directly into the file so it can be read by any application in the future.

This feels like a bug, but it would also seem that others would have this problem and I haven't found a matching situation on this message board, so I'm not sure what to think.

[Bob Somrak]

This was and maybe still is a known issue under certain scenarios.  Read through this thread to see if this is your issue

https://feedback.photoshop.com/conversations/lightroom-classic/lightroom-classic-not-showing-the-fac... 

[abbeyroad71]

THANK YOU! I had spent hours trying to isolate the problem with no luck, but your post finally pointed me in the right direction. Confirmed that this is still a bug in 10.1.1, specifically for JPG files that have anything other than the default EXIF orientation flag. The metadata is stored in the file, but is not being read when the file is imported into a different catalog.

[Bob Somrak]

BTW, if you are using the newest version of LrC than post you comments in the other thread.  Not sure if this has been fixed or not in the latest versions.

[abbeyroad71]

Done, and there are actually two threads out there with the same issue, one dating back to May 2019. Adobe...are you listening?

[DdeGannes]

Quote " I've created a new Lightroom catalog. As the newly-reorganized photos were importing into Lightroom"

Whow, that means the Face Recognation has to rebuild, this is a extremely time consuming process which will depend on the number of image files in your system. Just my thoughts.

[Bob Somrak]

@DdeGannes 

The OP is importing JPG files that have previously has face regions saved to XMP.  I would not be necessary to rebuild the face recognition if the bug linked above didnt exist.

[abbeyroad71]

Correct. This catalog contains exclusively finished-product JPG files, so it made more sense to import cleanly into a new catalog that represented the new file structure. And I'm glad I did, otherwise I wouldn't have known that this would be an issue had I lost the data from my original catalog for some reason. (Although now I realize this is an issue on Lightroom reading the metadata, not writing it).