PM-written Metadata (Colors/Rating/Captions) not showing up in Lightroom Classic

[PeteK]

Hello everybody!

My standard workflow is to ingest images and make selects using PhotoMechanic, and then pull them into Lightroom Classic to tone. I started using a new external hard drive last week, and Lightroom doesn't see ANY metadata (most critically colors/ratings, but it also doesn't see any IPTC written on ingest - it does see the IPTC written by the camera).

Everything works fine for the same images simultaneously ingested by PM to my internal hard drive (I can see the metadata written during the ingest in LR, I can see colors and ratings applied post-ingest), leading me to conclude that the issue is something with the external drive. My old drives, where the workflow worked, were formatted as "Mac OS X Extended (journaled)" while the new one is "APFS (Case-Sensitive, Encrypted)."

Has anyone had this issue before? Should I format my new drives as something else? Or am I totally off on my assessment that it's a drive issue?

[I'm also aware that this might be more of a Lightroom question than a PM one, but this forum has been such a help over the years, I thought I'd start here].

Thanks all! Happy holidays!
Pete

[MNeipris]

The issue is most likely due to the external drive's case sensitive file system.

Since this is a new drive, the best option is to backup any content on the drive and then reformat the drive to a non case-sensitive file system.

Since the file system is case sensitive, one program may be creating an uppercase file while the other is creating a lowercase file, leading to the metadata existing in two places in the same folder, but neither program recognizing the files that the other created.. Using a non-case-sensitive file system avoids this issue, but if you need to use a case-sensitive filesystem, you can instruct Photo Mechanic to use a particular case in Preferences -> Files.

[PeteK]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! Backed up, reformatted to APFS Encrypted and just imported a test folder — seems to work now!

Many thanks!