How to reset Lightroom metadata, but keep develop settings?

Raymond Wave said:

My photos taken with certain lenses (Sigma 50 ART and AF Nikkor 135/2 DC) have been importing as Unknown Lens recently. I'm under the impression that this is/was a bug in Lightroom and todays Lr CC update didn't seem to fix the already imported photos so I tried to reset metadata on a photo and the lens was now correctly identified.

But resetting metadata also resets develop settings and I need to reset a few months worth of photos (a few thousand). I can get the develop settings back by going a step backward in history, but this will take probably hours of clicking.

Is there a way to reset metadata only and keep develop settings? Aren't they separate things? Any ideas?

Click to expand...

You could blank out the relevant metadata. For example, Olympus spams all my images with its corporate name in my captions. Grr. So I just apply a preset with a blank caption.

Unfortunately, I dunno that this solution will help in the case of lens corrections. I'm not entirely sure, but in the past I found that IDing lens was more than a simple match with a field. There are tables of codes for lenses, but they aren't as reliable as they should be. DxO for example uses a combination of info from metadata to ID the lens.

But can you select say the Sigma images, then use the lens correction to apply it as a "custom"?

If you just want the name of the lens in the metadata for finding and filtering purposes (not actual correction), then you could use the Lens Tagger plugin (it's basically exiftool). It just fills in the fields. But be aware that can mess with Lr and/or DxO finding the lens; that's how I discovered that DxO's lens identification is more complicated than just reading a field or two of the exif data.

Having been burnt, I now add the info to a keyword hierarchy instead. Ugly, yes, but it works.

EDIT: what about using Synchronize; did it recognize "new" metadata, i.e. now find the correct lens info? It's kind of like reimporting, but I don't think it would mess with the other develop changes.

--
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”
— Edgar Degas

I actually found an official response to this:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/phot...ion-aux-lens-metadata-field-missing-on-import

There is a link to instruction page for parsing the metadata, which I understand is quite the same I did, but even more work.

I guess I just need to go through the edit history on every single edited file. I said earlier it's a few months worth of photos, but luckily "only" one months worth now that I checked. Didn't happen with all lenses, but most of them..

Not cool.

Raymond Wave said:

Is there a way to reset metadata only and keep develop settings? Aren't they separate things? Any ideas?

Click to expand...

They should be separate...can you try this? Select one of the affected images in Library, now choose Metadata/Read Metadata From File. I am wondering if that will force a re-read of the original metadata without affecting develop edits. If it works you could then select all images with that lens. The only disadvantage is it might wipe out keywords, descriptions you entered. Which is why you want to test with just one image first.

(I can't try it because I don't have an affected camera/lens)

I agree with graybalanced; the metadata for lenses should be reread (the save to, read from process) without affecting anything else. It's analogous to writing captions, keywords, etc etc; you can do that without changing any of the develop settings.

Lr has to process metadata, and does that on reading the image file. So this is sort of the refresh process you referred to. It has to parse the file's data to get the proper lens info.

You should be able to do it on a bunch of files at once. I change metadata all the time with say Photo Mechanic and then do huge synchronizations or manual "read metadata from files" for hundreds. It should work, but test.

Good find on that fix BTW.

"You could blank out the relevant metadata. For example, Olympus spams all my images with its corporate name in my captions. Grr."

that is really annoying. I wonder if there is a metadata setting on your camera that you can change to turn that off?

Re-read metadata is what I did already, I mistakenly said "reset metadata", but what I did was indeed "read metadata from file". This now correctly identifies the lens, but also resets the develop settings.

Good news is that the develop settings can be returned by going one step backward in History, but it takes A LOT of work to do this for all affected photos. Going through photos in develop module is very slow.

Luckily I don't use keywords or other metadata, otherwise I guess I would have to do what Adobe suggests and save metadata to file for each photo.

That's why Adobe suggested WRITING metadata first to the file, then reading it.

Many of us automatically write ALL metadata to files (and like to argue endlessly about it). It's a trivially small amount of data, but it can trigger a backup depending on your backup software and file type.

Raymond Wave said:

"You could blank out the relevant metadata. For example, Olympus spams all my images with its corporate name in my captions. Grr."

that is really annoying. I wonder if there is a metadata setting on your camera that you can change to turn that off?

Click to expand...

I wish. I complained to Oly and they basically said "tough." Easy enough to remove it since I use presets a lot anyway. I thought of just adding " SUCKS" to the end of their text so it would get uploaded whenever I posted an image online, but I thought it might trigger a filter or something.

robgendreau said:

You could blank out the relevant metadata. For example, Olympus spams all my images with its corporate name in my captions. Grr. So I just apply a preset with a blank caption.

Click to expand...

I had an Olympus from 1999 that did that. 17 years later and they still do that ?!? Geez

In your Library module, use the Metadata filter to find all images with "Unknown Lens" since March of this year. The collection should include all the images you've imported since the version 6.5 update, which has the bug.

• Ctl/Cmd, A to select all "Unknown Lens" files
• Ctl/Cmd, S to save Metadata to the files. If you shoot in Raw, this will create sidecar XMP files preserving all the work you've done to the images since import. This is an important step because, if skipped, the next step will undo any editing you've done to the files.
• Ctl/Cmd, R to read Metadata from the XMP files. This will read and display the Metadata, including the lens ID info.

Raymond Wave said:

My photos taken with certain lenses (Sigma 50 ART and AF Nikkor 135/2 DC) have been importing as Unknown Lens recently. I'm under the impression that this is/was a bug in Lightroom and todays Lr CC update didn't seem to fix the already imported photos so I tried to reset metadata on a photo and the lens was now correctly identified.

But resetting metadata also resets develop settings and I need to reset a few months worth of photos (a few thousand). I can get the develop settings back by going a step backward in history, but this will take probably hours of clicking.

Is there a way to reset metadata only and keep develop settings? Aren't they separate things? Any ideas?

Click to expand...

Bill Ferris said:

In your Library module, use the Metadata filter to find all images with "Unknown Lens" since March of this year. The collection should include all the images you've imported since the version 6.5 update, which has the bug.

• Ctl/Cmd, A to select all "Unknown Lens" files
• Ctl/Cmd, S to save Metadata to the files. If you shoot in Raw, this will create sidecar XMP files preserving all the work you've done to the images since import. This is an important step because, if skipped, the next step will undo any editing you've done to the files.
• Ctl/Cmd, R to read Metadata from the XMP files. This will read and display the Metadata, including the lens ID info

Click to expand...

Didn't realize you could do this in batches (or can you?). I already re-read the metadata from image file, just have to go through edited photos and step back one step in History, takes some time...

So the editing info will still be there if you re-read the metadata, it just resets to default values which can be undone - and still keeping the new lens info.

Raymond Wave said:

Bill Ferris said:

In your Library module, use the Metadata filter to find all images with "Unknown Lens" since March of this year. The collection should include all the images you've imported since the version 6.5 update, which has the bug.

• Ctl/Cmd, A to select all "Unknown Lens" files
• Ctl/Cmd, S to save Metadata to the files. If you shoot in Raw, this will create sidecar XMP files preserving all the work you've done to the images since import. This is an important step because, if skipped, the next step will undo any editing you've done to the files.
• Ctl/Cmd, R to read Metadata from the XMP files. This will read and display the Metadata, including the lens ID info

Click to expand...

Didn't realize you could do this in batches (or can you?). I already re-read the metadata from image file, just have to go through edited photos and step back one step in History, takes some time...

So the editing info will still be there if you re-read the metadata, it just resets to default values which can be undone - and still keeping the new lens info.

Click to expand...

YES, most definitely it's a batch thing. Sorry; didn't realize you didn't know that or we would have mentioned it before.

The order makes a difference. Save first (which commits all the parameters stored in Lr's database to the image files or their sidecars). Then when you read the metadata from the file it copies back what you already had, but it forces Lr to match the lens info correctly.

I'm not sure why you have to go back a step in development history, but if it's undoing the same adjustment sometimes it's easier to do that in a batch as well, if it's the same change (like say changing WB to daylight). If it was something else, like a reset, where the last step before that in every image was different, that's tougher. You could try this "ScrewAutoSync" script, but it's not for the faint of heart: https://forums.adobe.com/message/3171709

Raymond Wave said:

I actually found an official response to this:

https://feedback.photoshop.com/phot...ion-aux-lens-metadata-field-missing-on-import

There is a link to instruction page for parsing the metadata, which I understand is quite the same I did, but even more work.

I guess I just need to go through the edit history on every single edited file. I said earlier it's a few months worth of photos, but luckily "only" one months worth now that I checked. Didn't happen with all lenses, but most of them..

Not cool.

Click to expand...

Gee, thanks ! I had the same problem and wondered how to solve it...