Yesterday I ran a bunch of my photos through exiftool in order to change their lens information. (I shoot some lenses on adapters and so the lens names and focal lengths have to be set manually.)
After exiftool was done with the photos I selected them in Lightroom and did Metadata → Read Metadata From File
. Great, the lens names are there now! I didn’t realize that doing this would also reset Lightroom’s information about modifications to the files. Now those hundreds of files have lost the edits I’ve made to them!
I have backups both of the Lightroom catalog and of the photo files themselves. How can I use these backups to restore my modifications to the files?
Ideally the new lens metadata would also be kept, although my edits are more important. And in the future, do I just need to make sure I run exiftool before editing photos in Lightroom, or is there a way to reread the file’s metadata while keeping Lightroom’s modification info intact?