I needed to make a specific change to an exif field of some images. So what I did was to move identify the files that I needed to change in Lightroom (they were in various folders on my disk) and move them to other folders so they would be easy to operate on. Then I used exiftool to change the field in these files, and then I thought it would be easy to read in the changed data and move them back to their original folders in Lightroom. What I found included:
- I tried to Synchronize Metadata on the folders after changing the exif field. One folder had about 500 images in it, the other about 2,000. After 3 hours, the progress bar had barely moved, and I aborted.
- When I tried to quit Lightroom it said that it was "writing metadata", even tho the synchronization had changed the external data and it should only have been reading metadata. I quit anyways and rebooted.
- After rebooting, and relaunching Lightroom I looked at the "metadata status" column in Grid view. It was (as always, it seems) completely wrong about which files were up to date.
- I was able to "read metadata" on these 2,500 images in "only" about an hour or two. Note that I didn't ask Lightroom to update the cached images, only to read the metadata. Reading metadata at 1,000-2,000 images an hour seems exceptionally slow.
- Now I am trying to move the files back to their correct folders. I dragged about 1,000 raw images (CR2 + xmp) from one folder to another in Lightroom. Three hours later it is about 50% finished according to the progress bar. I'm going to bed and hope it will finish by the morning. I have to move all the other images as well, but because Lightroom won't update the filter bars in Grid View while moving files, I can't start these moves until Lightroom finishes the first.
Do other people fine absolutely absurd speeds for file operations in Lightroom? Is there any solution other than quitting and rebooting (which doesn't always work)? I hate to quit in the middle of a synchronize, read metadata, or move files operation even when it seems to be barely chugging along, because I am afraid that when I abort the operation, I will somehow leave a file orphaned, or it's metadata out of sync (which happens to me all the time, but I never know why).
When I am doing other operations I also find that I can use Lightroom for only a few hours before it gets so slow that I quit and reboot, after which operations speed up considerably. This doesn't seem like it should be necessary for a "modern" program and operating system, but in my experience it is.
I'm using a Macintosh (4 core i7, 16 GB of RAM), Mavericks latest, Lightroom 5.5, and a RAID disk, so hardware shouldn't be limiting. During this last interminable copy operation, it appears that Lightroom is pegged at 100% of a processor (core).