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I use Lightroom and Photo Mechanic. When I make changes in Photo Mechanic (ratings, colour labels, etc.), the changes are written to an XML file. Often I make hundreds of changes.
In Lightroom, it is slow and cumbersome to make LR load the XML and determine that the metadata status has changed.
Can I somehow force Lightroom to read all or some of the images to see that there are changes?
Select any level under "Catalog" (i.e. "All Photographs"); or any level under "Folders" or "Collections," and press CMD-A (mac)/CTRL-A (win) to select all images. Then select menu Metadata>Read Metadata from Files. This will prompt you with a warning about overwriting the catalog... select "Read," and go take a break if there are a lot of images to update the catalog for.
You can, of course, manually select fewer images rather than all of them at that level (e.g. click>shift click).
For any level under the "Folders" tree you can also just select the folder and right-click>Synchronize Folder, then select "Scan for metadata updates" in the pop-up; there's no warning dialog this way and it's a couple clicks shorter.
When you do a sync of a library folder you get a popup that looks like this:
If you select 'Scan for metadata updates' you should be able to update an entire folder's worth of image metadata...
@BobT's answer got me diving deeper into the Metadata menu in Lightroom Classic.
The item "Read Metadata from File" is how Lightroom Classic accomplishes a comprehensive metadata refresh.
