One of the benefits of Lightroom Publish Services is the ability to update metadata between Lightroom and the remote copy of the files (in this case, the Mediagraph copy). Metadata can flow in both directions, so that changes made in one place can be sent to the other copy.

Mediagraph and Lightroom Metadata Syncing Structure

While it’s possible to keep fields in sync between Lightroom and the remote service, there are some issues:

• The metadata in Mediagraph is more comprehensive than the data in Lightroom. There are more fields, and more enrichment for the fields like Keywords that exist in both applications. 
• Because Lightroom is a single user application and Mediagraph is a multi-user app, the metadata in Mediagraph should be more complete. In an institutional collection, it’s unlikely that the single Lightroom operator knows everything about all the photos and the subjects pictured. And one of the major objectives of Mediagraph is to allow crowdsourcing of knowledge about the institution. 

Due to the issues above, we have structured the Lightroom/Mediagraph relationship as follows:

• The initial upload of metadata from LR to Mediagraph brings along all the Lightroom metadata into Mediagraph.
• After initial upload from LR, the metadata in Mediagraph is considered to be “the truth”. 
  • New metadata created in Lightroom is not uploaded to Mediagraph. 
  • This prevents unintentional modification or destruction of Mediagraph metadata remotely from Lightroom.
• Metadata that is created in Mediagraph and which can be displayed in Lightroom can be imported into the Lightroom catalog.
  • In most metadata fields, this will overwrite the metadata that is already in Lightroom.
  • For keywords, Mediagraph metadata is imported into a special parent keyword called “~Mediagraph tag” to avoid messing up your existing keywords.
• Metadata syncing down to the catalog can be selected on a field-by-field basis.
  
  • You can choose this in the Lightroom Publishing Manager Dialog. 
  • You can also choose which fields to sync when running the sync.