Lightroom appears to change every photo when I save metadata

[Stefnocrat]

Hi all, would be most appreciative of any help the community can provide.

My setup is as follows:

1. 40,000 photos stored on an SSD locally attached to my MAC - this is my primary database where I do all my editing using Lightroom 6

2. Synology Cloudstation Drive is used to sync these photos to a two bay Synology NAS (running the latest DSM software)

3. The NAS is configured with full redundancy using the Synology proprietary method

4. All the photos are then sync'd to Amazon Cloud Drive and Onedrive

The issue I am having is that whenever I update metadata in a small number of the photos on the SSD, as soon as I commit the metadata to file, Cloudstation Drive concludes that every single photo has been changed and commences syncing every single file to the NAS which in turns goes nuts because it has to keep the two drives in sync and it has to sync back to the two cloud providers.  The real issue is that Cloudstation Drive appears to do everything 3 times - it reports back that 120,000 updates were sync'd.

I have to add that Lightroom appears to be changing every single photo as it takes a very long time to save the metadata, a lot longer than one would expect for changes made to only a couple of hundred images at a time. Probably not a Synology issue then - I have certainly looked at every single option in both programmes.

Stefan

[Stefnocrat]

I think I may have answered my own question. It seems that if you right click on the folder where your images are stored and select "Save Metadata" it overwrites every file in that folder regardless of whether or not the metadata has changed. If however you go to the Metadata menu and select "Save Metadata to file" it saves only the files most recently changed. Same happens if you select CMD S on the mac keyboard. Live and learn...phew!

[Just Shoot Me · Accepted solution]

Have you thought about turning on the option to "Auto Write Changes into XMP" on the Metadata tab of the Catalog Settings?

That way any changes made to a file are auto written to a XMP file for proprietary RAW files and into a special part of a DNG, JPG, TIFF and PSD file. It does the same thing as CMD+s/Ctrl+S (Windows) but Automatically.

[Stefnocrat]

Many thanks! I did a bit of research on that option but did not clock that it  did the same as CMD S - assumed it only worked on RAW files. Have set that option now - thanks for help.

[Just Shoot Me]

LR never changes the original file even if it is a JPG, TIFF, PSD, DNG or proprietary RAW file. So without that option checked the only way to store edits (Real Edits made in the Develop module) with the file is by either that option or the Save Metadata to File menu item or CMD/Ctrl + s.

Please note that not all changes made in LR are written into the Metadata of the file. Things like collections are only stored in the LR catalog file.

Best of luck to you.