Lighroom question about ratings

All of the jpg exports I make from my weddings are *** (three-star) rated. Currently I'm attempting to put together a master portfolio of all of my wedding photos and have imported all of these jpgs (thousands from all of the weddings that I've shot) into a NEW catalog called 'wedding portfolio'. My aim is to re-rate these choosing only those I deem portfolio-worthy.

My question: If I select all images and re-set them to being zero-star (because on import apparently LR extracts the *** rating from the metadata of the jpg), does the rating I now impose on these jpgs get somehow pushed to the metadata ? Or would I have to export again ? I guess I don't care about pushing this to the metadata, I just want to be sure that the images won't somehow 'revert' to the *** rating in the metadata.

If anyone knows what I'm talking about that would be amazing given how unclear all of that sounded.

Any suggestions ?

Pretty sure that even for JPEGS all changes are stored in the LR catalogue, including those made to the EXIF. If you then export with EXIF intact the new values will be written into the new JPEG file. You can though chose to write metadata to file. This will write the new metadata (EXIF info) to the existing file. I believe that LR does this without rewriting the image data, so that it is not recompressed. You can though if you only have the changes stored in the Catalogue file re-read the image metadata from the original file, which would overwrite the catalogue with the original version of the data. So you might want to avoid doing a read metadata from file.

Alan

Changes to the star rating won't be written to the file metadata unless you re-export. The rating will be saved in the catalog and only written to metadata when the image is exported.

Thanks Alan and Dan.

That's sort of what I anticipated, but counter to what I thought was happening--I probably did something silly. Things seem to operating normally now--the new ratings are holding.

Is there a way to export the images I do select in such a way as to avoid re-compressing ? Updating the metadata affects the original files--something I'd like to avoid mainly because the source images are in a multitude of folders.

It really depends on what you want to do with these images, once you have made the selection of which ones you want in the port. Either you can export those images from LR to a new location, which will create a new file. Or you have to copy the existing JPEG files to a new location, assuming that you want to keep the original file in it's original location. It really depends on what you actually want to do with the images next.

Personally I would not have created a new catalogue to do this in either. I would have done it in my existing catalogue. Lots of ways to mark images for specific use. For something like selections for a port, well I would just put them in a collection. If they then needed special processing I would just create a VC to do that. That is really no different to using a new catalogue file. I take it that you shot all these images originally as JPEGs? Otherwise I would be going back to the original RAW files to do this work.

Alan

Like Alan I would have avoided the whole issue by sorting in my existing catalogue. Assuming you wanted to choose without actually changing the current rating for those images.....

I would just select all the images I want to choose from, right click on them and "create virtual copies". (Takes up no extra space on drive). The VCs will automatically be selected on creation then just add a keyword "spudmonster test" (or some other silly phrase that wont appear in any other keywords) to the images.

Next create a smart collection with one of the rules as Keyword contain all "spudmonster test" and you will have a collection filled with just these VCs. Just to clearly differentiate them in the catalogue you might want to select them all and set colour label to a colour you don't use for anything else. That way they will stand out amongst your normal image files.

Now you can rate them without affecting the rating of the originals and won't have to re-export them when finished.

Or rather than use the Spudmonster keyword, you could just use a custom text label for those VC's rather than one of the colours. Custom is one of the options along with the colours when sorting in the attributes section at the top of the Library module. It's the white square. If you want to find a specific custom label then there is a sort option that will sort for any specified string in both EXIF or IPTC fields. I use this to along with IPTC subject codes within Smart Collections.

Alan