XMP settings gone wonky

[mtomalty]

Hi

I have my raw image archive housed within LR4 and all images are on external drives
Worked yesterday with the archive with no problem accessing files ranging from 10 year old to
current with settings being applied from xmp sidecar files

This evening all files are accessible but none are appearing with settings applied and images
appear as in their unaltered 'raw' state apart from baseline settings for the respective camera models.

Save goes when I access the files via Camera Raw 5.
All edit settings are gone. Well,not gone, but not being applied.

XMP files appear in their respective folders adjacent to raw file.

Any clues?  No crashes,etc   On a Mac

Mark
www.marktomalty.com

[mtomalty]

Still looking for help to sort this out if anyone has suggestions.

Folders of Raw images on my desktop that I work with before archiving to external G-Drives are seen by Camera Raw
and Lightroom with edit settings, etc accurately.
My desktop working folders of raw files are copied to an external G-Drive and are also seen with correct settings in place

Four external G-Drives with Raw image archive are being 'seen' by Camera Raw and Lightroom as unedited Raw files
Up until yesterday afternoon this was not the case.
No crashes,glitches,updates in the interim.

XMP files are present in the respective raw folders with matching naming as always just that ACR and LR don't pick up this info.

I tried copying a folder of Raw images from one of the archive drives to my desktop and,oddly, for a brief second while Bridge is rendering the previews
my  rating tags are present but within 2-3 seconds disappear and the previews revert to unedited, out of camera state.

Mark
www.marktomalty.com

[Tim Lookingbill]

Have you tried applying "Synchronize Folders..." or some other type of refresh folder cache that forces LR to update its catalog system. Maybe you need to find the archived images original LR catalog folder.

As a Mac user I wondered about this ever happening just recently switching from CS3 to LR4 so I created a separate folder of test images for LR to "Point To" in building its catalog folder because I'm not clear on what the catalog records when folders of images are moved to another hard drive or folders are changed, renamed, etc. I'm still left asking what portion of that activity gets recorded for LR to pick up where the user left off upon returning to a previous state of organization since we only know what is recorded in xmp?

It's quite confusing which is why I'm not surprised you'ld have this problem and receive very few responses.

I've been away from LR and went back to working in CS3 until I can find the concentration level in my head to get used to the way LR deals with the simple task of editing and organizing images that seems less convoluted in Bridge/ACR in all its versions.

[mtomalty]

Thanks Tim but I don't think that would do the trick

Further digging has revealed another oddity.
Initially, I had been working with 5DMk3 files and had not looked at raw files from other cameras
or digital backs.
As it turns out, ONLY raw files from the 5DMk3 that are housed on two external drives are having
the issue with no edit settings being applied. Every other sort of camera file are behaving normally
in both Lightroom and Camera Raw.
As well,5DMk3 files on my iMac hard drive and a backup of same on an external drive are behaving
normally.

Does this shed any light on where I should look to sort this out?

Mark
www.marktomalty.com

[Tim Lookingbill]

Wish I could help you, Mark. I have no idea why that's happening.

Hopefully someone who's experienced the same and found a solution will post.

Good luck.

[wolfnowl]

Sorry, Mark.  Never seen that one before.  Sounds like Eric's territory.

Mike.

[john beardsworth]

I'm not sure the problem makes sense as explained. If "my raw image archive housed within LR4", why are you bothering about xmp files? LR will read xmp files when you import files into a catalogue, but from then onwards they are irrelevant. Have you more than one catalogue? Have you started a new one by mistake (look in File > Open Recent)?

[mtomalty]

Hi John

I only brought up xmp as I assumed that was where edit instructions and ranking info was
housed so that Lightroom and Camera Raw could apply.

Checked and I am still working with the correct catalogue

Long and short of it is that 5dMk3 files no longer are displayed with edit  and ranking info when viewed
in both programs.
36 hours earlier they were.  No other camera files similarly affected

Mark

[john beardsworth]

Long and short of it is that 5dMk3 files no longer are displayed with edit  and ranking info when viewed
in both programs.

And these files have not been imported into Lightroom in the last 36 hours?

Select one of these pictures and take a look at the History panel in Develop. Does it give any clues?

John

[mtomalty]

Thanks John
I'll check the history panel on Monday as I'm out of town.

To answer your question. No,none of the files were imported in the last 36 hours and,in fact, I had been
working with them a couple of days ago and all were behaving normally.

It's was as if I had accidentally hit a switch that reset only the 5DMk3 files to camera default.

Thx for the feedback
Mark

[wolfnowl]

"It's was as if I had accidentally hit a switch that reset only the 5DMk3 files to camera default."

Hmmm... There is a Develop setting option (Develop/Set Default Settings) that will set the default slider settings to whatever you have currently set; this is defined per camera.

I don't know how you could accidentally reset this, but I'd definitely have a look at the History for these images.

Mike.

[john beardsworth]

The Reset button or maybe in Library where there's a Metadata > Read from file? The History panel may provide the clue.

[mtomalty]

Mike and John,

Back home and still no solution to my problem.

History panel for all my 5DMk3 files show nothing but the import date.
This would be normal,I suppose, since the massive percentage of my editing is done in Camera Raw.

Just want to restate my basic workflow to see if that triggers a clue.
Basically,I shoot raw and edit,select,rank,and do most of my color edits in Camera Raw
Camera Raw is set up to "save settings in .xmp sidecar"
Folders are on my desktop
At the end of each month or thereabouts I rename ,etc and copy the folder(s) to external G drives
Once there I import the folders into Lightroom and, fundamentally, use Lightroom as my archiving
software.
I am slowly getting up to speed with Lightroom and am slowly moving away from my Camera Raw workflow.
I always use the native Raw format of my respective cameras and do not use DNG unless it is the
native file of the camera in use

That's it in a nutshell. Flawed but functional for many years.

As stated, I was working last week in Lightroom with 5DMk3 files. In a morning session of
accessing and outputting files,Lightroom behaved normally with edit settings in place from their
earlier 'life' in Camera Raw. I took a break,closed Lightroom, and when I restarted a few hours
all edit settings for 5DMk3,only, were reset back to default as if they were straight out of the camera.

I've tried dumping folders from Lightroom and re importing,both from my primary archive as well as
a secondary set of external drives yet no info from the corresponding .xmp files is being applied
I did note that in the Import window of Lightroom I was set with 'minimal' selected and not
'Embedded and sidecar'. Switched thinking this would do the trick but no change.

So,there you have it. Still stuck and confused.

One detail I missed to share last week was that between my two Lightroom working sessions where things
went wonky I ran Apple's Disk Utility as my iMac seemed sluggish.
Disk Utility found nothing and no measures were taken beyond running the program.

As always,anything you have would be helpful

Mark
www.marktomalty.com

[wolfnowl]

You've got me stumped, Mark.  You mentioned you processed the images in ACR, wrote the metadata out to the .xmp files, then opened them in LR.  If all was right with the world, the LR would read the metadata from the .xmp files and apply those settings to the edits.

Now, .xmp files are just text files, so all of the ACR settings should be recorded in there. Have you tried opening a couple of the .xmp files in Notepad or some text editor to see what the numbers are?  That would at least tell you if LR is not reading/applying the information or whether there's nothing there to read.

Mike.

[Denis de Gannes]

Lightroom should read the .xmp data if you are doing an import.

If you have already imported the files into Lightroom and have done further edits to the raw files using ACR then in Lightroom you need to go to the Menu bar and select Photo > Read Metadata from File.

[mtomalty]

Thanks.

Just took your suggestion,Mike, and the prognosis is not good.
Opening a sample of problem .xmp files shows that everything relating to Camera Raw settings
has been,somehow,wiped and there are only about 40-50 lines of code compared to a couple of hundred
on an unaffected file so basically I'm f%*ked with respect to legacy settings on this group of images
which amounts to hundreds and hundreds of hours of time.

The only settings remaining in the .xmp files are caption and keyword info that was applied from
PhotoMechanic.
Not even any camera model or capture time info has been retained


I have used PhotoMechanic for key wording for 10+ years and use it for every camera/digital back
over those years.

Mark

[Dan Glynhampton]

so basically I'm f%*ked with respect to legacy settings on this group of images
which amounts to hundreds and hundreds of hours of time.

Mark, one possible glimmer of hope...

You say that the files were displaying normally with all edits in place when you initially imported them. Did you take a backup of the catalogue before the data was lost, perhaps after your morning session when things were working normally?  If you did, the edit information for those files should be in that backup, so try restoring that catalogue .

If you didn't, I fear your assessment of the situation may be correct 

Dan

[mtomalty]

K.  I believe i figured it out.
I will take responsibility for misremembering my timeline where i thought things went off the rails.
Lightroom is primarily an archive solution for me and I rarely dig into the files here.
As I said, i work in Camera Raw where I edit and rename. Then files are brought into PhotoMechanic and keyworded (because that's where i
always did it)
Then folders are duplicated onto two separate drive sets for 2 backups. The 'main' set is then imported into Lightroom and archived and, until recently, rarely worked with.

In my intiial summary i had misremembered, or hadn't paid too much attention to the files I was accessing from Lightroom in my morning session last week. Most were 5DMk2's and not 5DMk3's as thought
5DMkll's are displayed with edits as would be expected. 5DMk3's are the problem and I didn't start working with them until the afternoon session mistakenly thinking the change had occurred between the two working sessions.

As evidenced by the various responses here, none of it really followed any sort of logic.

Mike's suggestion to check the XMP file started the unravelling process.
All 5DMk3 files were missing every piece of data except what I had input in PhotoMechanic

I then decided to test PhotoMechanic by taking a selection of unarchived,recent 5DMk3 files which displayed all the appropriate edit and ranking info and verified that this data was present in the
xmp files.
I then brought this set of images into PhotoMechanic and applied some caption and keyword info.

Aften completion I once again opened the xmp files and discovered  that ALL Camera Raw data had been wiped out leaving only PhotoMechanic data.

So ultimately the culprit is PhotoMechanic and not Lightroom. Apologies for presenting inaccurate info early on but as a result of dialogue here the problem was diagnosed
and I am f@#%ked with regard to 1.5 years of work on 5DMk3 files courtesy of PhotoMechanic
As a result of using PhotoMechanic as the last step before archiving both my main archive and backup, offsite archive have the XMP data corrupted


Mark

P.S.-I've attached both before and after PhotoMechanic xmp files for reference sake

[john beardsworth]

That sounds odd, because PM is one of the best at "roundtripping" and preserving existing values in xmp. I'd expect you would be able to use it to add ratings and captions and any ACR settings would still be in the xmp files. On the other hand the more apps in a workflow the more the potential for forgetting something along the way.

[wolfnowl]

Glad you found your answer.  Sorry it had to be that one.

Mike.