Lost star rating on import to desktop

[Wurtzel]

I selected and rated (one or 2 stars) all the final photos in Lightroom on my laptop onto an external hard drive.

I then used that hard drive to import the same folder into my desktop Lightroom Classic CC.

I must have clicked override disk, because ALL RATING IS GONE!!!!!

Is there any way to get it back? I looked in Bridge and none of the images are rated.

Help!!!

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

Lightroom stores edits and metadata such as ratings in its catalog, not in the images. That is why they don't have these edits when you import them again in another catalog. Instead you should have used 'Import from Another Catalog' to do this. Another method is to use 'Metadata - Save metadata to files'. That saves the edits en metadata to a small 'sidecar' file (for raw images) or in the file (jpeg), so that other applications (Bridge) can read them.

[Wurtzel]

Thank you! I thought I had saved all the metadata by clicking Save All before closing Lightroom in the laptop, but I’ll have to look for the option to save all to file. Is that on the original import, or before closing?

[JohanElzenga]

Wurtzel  wrote

Thank you! I thought I had saved all the metadata by clicking Save All before closing Lightroom in the laptop, but I’ll have to look for the option to save all to file. Is that on the original import, or before closing?

It's a menu item that you have to invoke after you've finished the edits. If you selected a lot of images, then give Lightroom some time to do this. If you quit Lightroom right after you chosen this menu, it might not have had enough time to write to all the selected images.