# Syncomatic not working (fix? alternatives?)



## Stephanie Booth (Sep 24, 2018)

I've been trying to get syncomatic to work for days now, and though it seems to work _once_ after opening a catalog, it doesn't after that. I'm trying to merge keywords. I've tried both identical filenames (and create a test case for that to makes sur) and capture time. No luck.

Another option I have is LR transposer, which works well, but only allows to import keywords for files which have the same name -- you can't import metadata to a file based on capture time, and often the files I want to merge metadata for don't have the same name, though they are duplicates.

Does anybody have ideas -- either for getting syncomatic to work or something else that might do the trick?


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## johnbeardy (Sep 24, 2018)

I'm sorry it doesn't work for you, but I have checked a couple of times and I am sure it is working as it should.


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 24, 2018)

Stephanie Booth said:


> you can't import metadata to a file based on capture time, and often the files I want to merge metadata for don't have the same name, though they are duplicates.


Why not? I'm sure I've done a capture time match in the past, but in my case I was importing GPS on files that had been renamed. It was a while ago though.


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## Stephanie Booth (Sep 26, 2018)

Victoria Bampton said:


> Why not? I'm sure I've done a capture time match in the past, but in my case I was importing GPS on files that had been renamed. It was a while ago though.


LR Transporter offers a certain number of fields you can match to import metadata. Capture time is not one of them.





I've worked it out by messing around with everything in google sheets and then reimporting metadata based on filename. Looking at it now, I guess that by copying capture time to Job Identifier for example, it would be possible to import based on capture time.


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## Stephanie Booth (Sep 26, 2018)

johnbeardy said:


> I'm sorry it doesn't work for you, but I have checked a couple of times and I am sure it is working as it should.


Any ideas as to how I could troubleshoot and try and find out why/how it is failing to work on my catalog?


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## Victoria Bampton (Sep 26, 2018)

Maybe I'm imagining things Stephanie. I think it was 2014 when I had to do that GPS import, so my memory may have faded!


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## johnbeardy (Sep 26, 2018)

Maybe just select a number of thumbnails that you think should sync, do an Export as Catalog, and let me have a look? I'd only need the lrcat file, not the previews or the images.


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## Stephanie Booth (Sep 30, 2018)

johnbeardy said:


> Maybe just select a number of thumbnails that you think should sync, do an Export as Catalog, and let me have a look? I'd only need the lrcat file, not the previews or the images.


Sorry it took me a while to get around to this, but here we go. Here's a small catalog of files I think should sync. One of the three pairs did. The other two didn't.

I figured that maybe I was misunderstanding what "merge keywords" meant. I assumed it worked both ways, and that which file was selected as source wasn't important. But maybe I'm wrong about that. So I tried using alternatively one folder, and then the other, as source. Still no luck.

I closed Lightroom, tried synchronizing keywords for the two other sets that hadn't synchronized... and they did. And it seems the keywords do indeed merge both ways...?

I fooled around with a few more tests and discovered something I had *completely* missed: I had always assumed (maybe not reading the documentation closely enough??) that syncomatic did its job _on the photos currently selected_. But in fact, it does its job on other photos too, to my dismay! (Because this was not what I intended.). So I'm guessing it acts on all photos in the source and destination folders?

I still don't understand why the two sets of photos included in the catalog didn't sync the first time around, but did after closing and opening LR again.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this!

syncomatic troubleshooting 6 photos.lrcat.zip


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## johnbeardy (Sep 30, 2018)

Syncomatic  only _operates_ on photos that are selected.  By operate I mean that it _completely_ ignores unselected photos, which is important to prevent it updating files that it shouldn't, and prevents it getting metadata from other, irrelevant images.

It certainly does not act on all photos in the source and destination folders, again just those images that the user has selected. The only purpose of identifying source and target folders is to distinguish the source photos from the target photos, and this is only necessary when the user wants to copy between files which are the same type, such as JPEG to JPEG. By default, the plugin expects the user to be copying between file types, such as from JPEG to Raw, so the file type identifies the source and target. But people wanted to go JPEG to JPEG etc which makes it much more difficult to distinguish source from target and could be disastrous. So if the source filenames don't have any distinguishing prefix or suffix, the plugin forces the user to say this folder/collection contains the source JPEGs, this contains the targets. 

And the plugin is cautious on principle - if it can't be certain what the user wants to do, it doesn't update images. Undo is available, and the web page advises about backup and testing.

The "merging" means that it doesn't replace the keywords in the target photos, but adds the keywords from the source images. So if a target image starts with 10 completely different keywords from the source image's 15 keywords, merging 1means that the target image would have 25. Nothing happens to the source images.

Hope that clarifies things.


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## Stephanie Booth (Sep 30, 2018)

johnbeardy said:


> Syncomatic only _operates_ on photos that are selected. By operate I mean that it _completely_ ignores unselected photos, which is important to prevent it updating files that it shouldn't, and prevents it getting metadata from other, irrelevant images.
> 
> It certainly does not act on all photos in the source and destination folders, again just those images that the user has selected. The only purpose of identifying source and target folders is to distinguish the source photos from the target photos, and this is only necessary when the user wants to copy between files which are the same type, such as JPEG to JPEG. By default, the plugin expects the user to be copying between file types, such as from JPEG to Raw, so the file type identifies the source and target. But people wanted to go JPEG to JPEG etc which makes it much more difficult to distinguish source from target and could be disastrous. So if the source filenames don't have any distinguishing prefix or suffix, the plugin forces the user to say this folder/collection contains the source JPEGs, this contains the targets.



OK, then I'm reassured, because that is what I had understood it did. But I'm positive that when I ran my second batch of tests, keywords I had set on the two selected photos got added to the neighbouring pair of photos that has the same capture date. I will test it again and let you know,  but it was on the four first photos in the catalog I sent you.



johnbeardy said:


> Undo is available, and the web page advises about backup and testing.



Glad to know undo works. As for testing, I've been doing exactly that, hence all my questions because it's not working how I expect it to!



johnbeardy said:


> The "merging" means that it doesn't replace the keywords in the target photos, but adds the keywords from the source images. So if a target image starts with 10 completely different keywords from the source image's 15 keywords, merging 1means that the target image would have 25. Nothing happens to the source images.



Thanks for the clarification. Again, I think I have seen behavior that does not match this, but I will check again and get back to you.


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