Today’s Question: Many of my images in Lightroom Classic show a symbol [indicating a metadata mismatch] at the upper-right of the thumbnails. I have enabled the “Automatically write changes into XMP” option in Catalog Settings. Why isn’t Lightroom Classic automatically saving the metadata? Is there something I’m missing?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The issue here is that images have been updated in some way outside of Lightroom Classic. As long as you’re sure that all important updates have been applied within your catalog, you can either ignore the symbol or choose the option to save updates to the source file.
More Detail: With the “Automatically write changes into XMP” checkbox turned on (which I do recommend), standard metadata as well as Develop updates applied within Lightroom Classic will be saved to the source image files on your hard drive. This will update an XMP sidecar file for proprietary raw captures and save metadata directly to the source file for other supported file types.
However, it is still possible for there to be a metadata mismatch if updates were applied outside of the Lightroom Classic catalog. This could have been as simple a matter as opening a raw capture directly from the operating system, causing it to be opened in Camera Raw via Photoshop. You might have also updated images using Adobe Bridge or other third-party software.
As long as you’re sure that all updates you actually care about were performed within Lightroom Classic, the metadata mismatch indication isn’t anything you really need to worry about. You could, for example, just ignore the icon.
If you do prefer to resolve the metadata mismatches, first make sure the source image files are currently available so the files can be updated. Then select the photo (or multiple photos) you want to update the metadata for within Lightroom Classic. Click the icon that indicates the metadata mismatch at the top-right of the thumbnail for one of the selected photos. In the dialog that appears, click the Overwrite Settings button. This will save the metadata updates from Lightroom Classic to the source file on the hard drive and resolve the metadata mismatch so the icon indicating this situation will disappear.
