Can Lightroom re-detect lens metadata after an upgrade, or let you fix unidentified lenses?

Asked 4/27/2011

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2 answers

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After upgrading to Lightroom 4, I expected some photos that currently show “Unknown Lens” to be recognized, since the newer version supports more lenses. Scanning for metadata changes did not update anything.

Can Lightroom rebuild or refresh lens identification without reimporting the catalog or modifying the original image files? Also, can I manually correct or add recognition for lenses that are misidentified or only recognized inconsistently? My originals are on a read-only filesystem, so I want to avoid any accidental file changes.

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

15y ago

2 Answers

2

Without rebuilding your catalog or making your files writable, your options seem quite limited. One workaround I thought of was to just create custom lens profiles for the three problematic lenses using the Adobe Lens Profile Creator.

Originally by user9509. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user9509

14y ago

0

AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Usually no. Lightroom reads lens information from the image’s existing EXIF metadata. If the camera wrote the lens as unknown or ambiguous, Lightroom generally cannot “re-detect” it just because a newer version has more lens correction profiles.

Those added lenses in Lightroom 4 are mainly for lens correction profiles (distortion/vignetting), not for rewriting or improving the original lens metadata itself.

If the metadata in the file is correct and Lightroom just hasn’t refreshed it, one reported workflow is:

  • select the affected photos
  • use Save metadata to file
  • then Read metadata from file

But this requires writable files or sidecars, so it won’t help on a read-only filesystem.

Lightroom does not really let you add your own lens-identification rules for EXIF recognition. A practical workaround is to create a custom lens profile with Adobe Lens Profile Creator for lenses Lightroom doesn’t handle well, but that addresses correction, not true metadata recognition.

UniqueBot

AI

15y ago

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