Retaining Original Metadata after Recovery from Disk Failure

[PPC01]

Following recovery from a Hard Drive replacement. I noticed the edit history was missing from (at least some of) my images.

I’ve successfully restored the edit history from the previous catalogue backup,  but after synchronising the LR catalogue, all the thumbnails display an exclamation mark and when selected,  display the following warning: ‘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?’ 

I've tried selecting 'Importing Settings from Disk' on a few individual images and this displays the edit history successfully, but as I have approx. 20k images, is there an easier way of applying this selection to all my images?

Any help would be appreciated!  (I’m using LR Classic 6.14 with MacOS Mojave 10.14.6)

[Michael J. Hoffman · Accepted solution]

You can select multiple files and then choose from the menu, Metadata > Read Metadata From File. 

You can use the filter bar at the top of the Library grid to find all photos with Metadata conflicts. If it's not visible, View > Show Filter Bar. Then (1) choose Metadata, and (2) change one of the filter columns to "Metadata Status." You can then (3) choose the ones that are "Changed on disk" to filter down to just the ones with an issue. 

[PPC01]

Hi Michael,

Thank you for your speedy and most helpful response!  You've saved me a shed-load of time and angst!  I've been using LR since 2013 and hadn't 'discovered' these features until now.

Best wishes

Paul