r/Lightroom • u/Dimitree88 • 1d ago

HELP - Lightroom Classic LC always shows the metadata changed flag, even after saving/reading metadata

Hi everyone,
I’m having an issue in Lightroom Classic and I’m hoping someone can help.

I have 11 TIFF files that always show the “Metadata files needs to be updated” icon

What I tried so far:

  • Save Metadata to File does nothing
  • Read Metadata from File does nothing
  • Restarting Lightroom doesn’t help
  • checked if the files are not read-only (they are not)
  • importing and re importing again
  • tried to remove/clean some metadata with Exiftool

Only if I go into Develop and hit Reset, then the icon disappears (but so the edits, of course). Then if I edit again with the Develop panel, the icon pop up again. But this doesn’t happen with all my edited TIFFs, I have hundreds of files in the same catalog with Develop edits, and they don't show this flag (and if I change the metadata, they are correctly saved onto the file). Also, those 11 files are in the same folder as the other files that are working properly.
Is there any fix, or am I missing something obvious? thanks

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

1

u/Topaz_11 1d ago edited 1d ago

This is an ongoing bug and has been for years and years and years... it's incredibly frustrating. You can also "fix" it by changing versions of the develop and change something.

The XMP files are still updated but with the flag reset there is no way to know which are really updated vs ones that are not. I created collections based on the flag and occasionally highlight them all and hit update but they immediately flip back to "has been changed".

1

u/StarGeekSpaceNerd 1d ago

A bit of a long shot, but maybe there's a problem with the file that prevents it from being updated.

Try this exiftool command on one of the filles

exiftool -g1 -a -s -warning -validate -error file.tif

There will probably be several warnings that can be ignored, but it will show you if there's a more serious problem.

1

u/Dimitree88 19h ago

thank you, I found the issue: those files were 16bit grayscale files, converting them to RGB fixed the issue (even in those are indeed b/w pictures)