LRC Message about Metadata for a photo being changed - Can you help?

[yyy2moose]

Question - Can you explain the reason for this message and best option to proceed?  I can choose one if I understand.  Thanks in advance.

LRC Message - “The metadata for this photo has been changed by both Lightroom and another application. Should Lightroom import settings from disk or overwrite disk settings with those from the catalog?”

Two options - Overwrite Settings, Import Settings from Disk

Background - I am running the latest LRC under MacOS. My photos/files are stored on an external drive directly attached to my MacBook Pro. I did rename the external drive outside of LRC but did not move any files.  So I do not know why I am getting this message.  My focus is to understand the message and options to proceed.   I seem to have this message on all of my many photos (about 65,000).

One other thing, I recently upgraded to Big Sur.

[yyy2moose]

I have found a similar post (sorry, I did not look sooner).  

Can anyone confirm that per response, I can;

1. Ignore this completely (you can turn off this warning in the view options) 

Thank you...

Responses:

1. 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.

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

1. 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).

1. 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".