Custom Metadata migration

[ArashA]

Hello,

The Lightroom guide states that when migrating a Lightroom Classic catalog to Lightroom Cloud, custom metadata will not be available after migration.

What constitutes custom metadata?

Specifically, where I have altered the capture date for a file (to have it reflect the actual date of a scanned image (e.g. 1970), rather than the date the scanned file was created (e.g. 2023) will the image file migrated to Lightroom Cloud show the date I had input (1970) or the date the file was created (2023)?

Thank you

[JohanElzenga]

Those dates should come over correctly. Custom metadata are unofficial extra metadata fields that you created yourself in Lightroom Classic. These are not supported in Lightroom cloud.

[ArashA]

Thank you for the reply. 

I've been hesitating about making the switch from LrClassic to Cloud for years.
 
First was the lack of keywords in LrCloud - that is no longer the case as I understand. 
so, deciding to go ahead I noticed the metadata issue and thought to investigate. 

My other concerns is lack of plugins for LrCloud - I use the Negative Lab Pro for digitizing film. 

And I think my *last worry*  - and here comes another question - is whether the Migrate Catalog process from LrClassic leaves the original photo files on the HD undisturbed. I believe this to be the case. Is that corret?

Thanks again. 

[JohanElzenga]

Yes, that is correct. Lightroom will never change original images.

[ArashA]

Hi there,

I'm not sure if this warrants an entirely new thread, so I thought I'd update my experience here. 

First, yes the hand entered metadata date field did upload properly- thanks for that. 

Now the not so good news.

I had read that a catalog's folder structure does not transfer to LrCloud and to preserve that information it's best to create collections within LrClassic prior to migrating the catalog to Lr Cloud. 
I did so, creating individual smart collections, one for every year of image capture, going back 30 years. That was a lot of clicking- only to find out that smart collections do not migrate to LrCloud. What a waste of time and effort!

And a bigger disappointment, even though the catalog migrated to LrCloud app pretty quickly without any exceptions, missing files or flagged warnings, the actual upload has been excruciating slow and irritatingly uninformative as to the progress. 

It's only 28,000 files for about 250GB of data, but the upload wheel has been churning for 72 hrs now. LrCloud app on the PC says the catalog is 28k files, but they are not all visible.

Worse yet, some files, specially scans of negatives converted in LrClassic with NLP plugin do not look as they should. I imagine this means that the sidecar edit information for the files are not yet uploaded?

It would be reassuring to know LrCloud is going to get it right in the end, and how far along it is in the process. 
My only recourse has been to log in to the Lr iOS app on the iPad to see how many files are available- where it say 210! And has not changed for a day or more. 

I've relaunched the LrCloud program and restarted the PC in an attempt to get things accelerated with no observable effect. 
My ISP upload speed and quotas has never been an issue. My entire PC backs up to the cloud in a few hours and I use smugmug source which takes the image raw files equally fast. 

I'm not sure there's any help that can be offered. Hoping someone can point out where I've gone wrong in my process or expectations. 
So far, I'd call the whole experience a dud!