# How to Overwrite Settings to a Group of Images not individually



## banksiagirl (Nov 18, 2017)

Operating System:Win 10
Exact Lightroom Version Classic 7.0.1
Hi everyone, my data drive died very suddenly in June - it got slower and wouldn't allow me to copy all my Lightroom photo folders before it collapsed. It was 2T and 2 years old

I back up LR almost every time I use it and have 3 copies of images straight from my SD cards stored in the camera folders eg 208D800E on separate EHDs but I hadn't backed up the actual photo folders since Feb  

I managed to copy my catalog and copied all my files until April. 

I was away from home until October using LR on my laptop with the catalog and photo folders on my EHD so now I'm reconstructing my photo folders using the catalog to identify the missing images so I can save my edits and ratings etc. 

I find the original NEF images, make folders matching those recorded in LR, convert them to DNG and rename and then reattach the lightroom link. Its tedious but I'm getting there.




 

The problem is that the imported photographs need to have the metadata from the catalog updated - so i need to overwrite the settings individually for each photo by clicking on the Overwrite Setting Button.
I've tried to select all and click the Overwrite button but nothing happens.
Any other way to do the photos as a group?
Thanks for reading this very long post!


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 18, 2017)

If you're sure that you want to overwrite the metadata using the catalog's metadata, I would have thought you could simply do that without bothering with that dialog box, i.e. select all the images in the Grid and do Ctrl+S to write metadata to those files. In theory that should get rid of the metadata status flag, but try it on a couple of files first.


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## banksiagirl (Nov 18, 2017)

Jim Wilde said:


> If you're sure that you want to overwrite the metadata using the catalog's metadata, I would have thought you could simply do that without bothering with that dialog box, i.e. select all the images in the Grid and do Ctrl+S to write metadata to those files. In theory that should get rid of the metadata status flag, but try it on a couple of files first.


Thanks Jim, that works a treat! I wish I'd asked the forum a while ago.

Further to this .... my edits were lost so showed up as missing files. I had to remove these from the catalog before  control+S would work on the selected folder of images. Live  and learn !


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