Month: October 2019

Today’s Question: Are there any Lightroom ratings that are visible in other software (such as star ratings)? What about color labels and pick flags? Any others that aren’t?

Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, as long as you save metadata updates to your source image files the star ratings and color labels will be visible to other software applications that display photo metadata. However, any pick and reject flags you assign will not be available outside of Lightroom Classic, even if you save metadata to your photos.

More Detail: There are two factors involved in making sure that the metadata updates you apply in Lightroom Classic are visible in other software applications. First, you need to make sure you are using metadata fields that are part of an established metadata standard. Second, you need to enable the option to save metadata to your source image files.

When it comes to ratings used to identify favorite (or not-so-favorite photos) in Lightroom Classic, both star ratings and color labels are included in established metadata standards. That means that most (if not all) image-management software would be able to understand the values you have assigned to these metadata fields in Lightroom Classic. However, the pick and reject flags available in Lightroom Classic are not part of a metadata standard, and would therefore not be available to other software applications.

In order for standard metadata updates to be visible to other software applications, you need to make sure that Lightroom is writing those updates to the photos themselves. By default Lightroom only saves metadata updates within the catalog. However, if you turn on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog, standard metadata updates will also be written to the source files in addition to being updated in the Lightroom catalog. Note that in the case of proprietary raw captures the metadata updates are actually written to XMP “sidecar” files rather than the original capture file.

Today’s Question: How many versions of your Lightroom Classic catalog do you retain when backing it up?

Tim’s Quick Answer: I generally retain only five backup copies of my Lightroom Classic catalog, including the most recent couple of backups, and backups from about one, three, and six months ago.

More Detail: The whole point of backing up your Lightroom catalog is to provide you with a way to restore from a backup should something go wrong. In general that means recovering from the most recent backup of your catalog. However, in some cases you may need to go back a bit further, which is why I recommend retaining more than just the most recent backup.

For example, if your Lightroom catalog becomes corrupted, it is possible that the most recent backup will also include some of the corruption that caused your catalog to be unusable. In that type of situation you may need to recover from an older backup.

Of course, if you restore from a particularly old backup of your catalog, you’re going to be missing many of the recent photos and metadata updates in that catalog. Therefore, it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense to retain especially old catalogs. If you need to go back very far, it might be best to just start with a new empty catalog and re-import all of your photos into that catalog.

So, I tend to retain a couple recent backups, as well as a few older backups of my Lightroom catalog. But I don’t retain especially old catalog backups, as old backups may be more trouble than they are worth.

Note, by the way, that one of the ways I help reduce the impact of a corrupted catalog is by saving metadata updates to my source images. This is enabled by turning on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings dialog in Lightroom Classic. With this option enabled, most of your metadata updates will be written to your source image files, helping to reduce the impact of having to start over with a clean catalog and re-importing your photos.

Today’s Question: By mistake I renamed over 30,000 photos outside of Lightroom [Classic]. What is the best approach to fixing this mess?

Tim’s Quick Answer: This is likely a rather significant problem, as Lightroom Classic can’t resolve the issue with any degree of automation. While I rarely recommend this solution, it might make the most sense to synchronize the affected folders, even though that will mean losing some of the metadata information for the affected photos.

More Detail: Because Lightroom Classic uses a catalog to manage the information about your photos, it important that any tasks related to the management of your photos be initiated within Lightroom. If you rename photos (or folders) outside of Lightroom, then the affected photos will appear as “missing” within Lightroom, because they can’t be found where they are expected.

If you had simply renamed a folder, you could reconnect that folder within Lightroom and all of the photos within the folder would no longer be missing. However, if you have renamed a large number of individual photos outside of Lightroom, those photos will need to be reconnected individually.

In other words, it would require quite a bit of time and patience to reconnect all of the missing photos, because you would want to confirm that you are connecting each individual photo correctly. For example, you might browse the individual photos in Adobe Bridge, compare each photo to the preview within Lightroom Classic, and then use that information to determine how to reconnect the missing photos with the applicable source file on your hard drive.

With such a considerable amount of work to do, it may be best to essentially start over in some respects. If the 30,000 photos that are now missing represent the bulk of the photos you are managing in Lightroom Classic, it might be easiest to create a new catalog and re-import from scratch. Note that this might cause you to lose most metadata updates to your photos, unless you had enabled the option to automatically save metadata updates to the photos themselves.

If the photos are a relatively small percentage of the total being managed in your Lightroom catalog, you might instead want to synchronize the affected folders. This will cause missing photos to be removed from Lightroom, and new photos to be imported. That would resolve the larger issue here, but would also cause you to potentially lose many of the metadata updates you had applied. You can initiate this process by right-clicking on a folder and choosing “Synchronize Folder” from the popup menu. After the scan is complete in the Synchronize Folder dialog you can click the Synchronize button to have Lightroom process the folder.

Needless to say, today’s question helps demonstrate why it is so important to work within Lightroom when you want to make changes to the overall storage structure for your photos. That said, if you do have a mess in Lightroom, you can learn to get things cleaned up with my “Cleaning Up Your Mess in Lightroom” course available in the GreyLearning library here:

https://timgrey.me/mess29