Consider a contact with a number of images.
1. click on Image => Metadata (IPTC template)
2. clear the template
3. Select some images
4. click on Image => Template and set an IPTC variable
5. click on Apply to selected images
Most of the time, the modification is applied as expected. However, in some cases for which I cannot find a consistent pattern, I get the following message:
" some of the images are read only because they are not locally available"
However, if you go ahead and apply the change to whatever files you might be able to apply (i.e., whatever files are not read only) you find that the changes are applied to every one of the selected files.
Very strange.