Lightroom Classic: Faces not imported to new catalog

Common mistake if you actually "re-imported the images" as opposed to "Import from another catalog" as face data (among other things) is not saved in metadata.  

Questions:

1)  Do you still have the old (bad) catalog?

2)  If you open the old catalog, are all the folders not missing (i.e. there are no "?" on the folder names or "!" on the images.  In other words are all the folders and images still where they were and named the same as when that catalog was last used?

If the answer to those two questions is yes then.....

1)  switch back to your new catalog and remove (not delete from disk, but remove from catalog) all the images in the catalog,  or create a brand new catalog

2)  Rather than "Importing" the images, use the "Import from another catalog" process and point to the old catalog (the bad one) and tell it to import all the images without moving them

You should then be good.

Dan

Hmm, my testing shows that face rectangles and the person keywords assigned to the rectangles are saved in the photo metadata when you do Metadata > Save Metadata To File or you have the Automatically Write Changes Into XMP catalog setting checked.

But I agree with Dan's suggestion that in general it is better to do File > Import From Another Catalog.

You're right.  I stand corrected.  Face rectangles are included in XMP files.

I did use the 'Import from another Catalog', but after it had all finished (several hours) when I clicked on 'People', LR put up a dialog asking me if I wanted to scan for faces in background. This threw me and I said a few rude words at the thought of renaming all my faces.

However, after reading your posts, I looked around and all the face previews had been copied across from old catalog to new, so I took the plunge and said yes to the dialog. Luckily it started loading my old faces and names, so it does work as it should. It was just that dialog that misled me.

Now I'll have a look at the old and new catalog using 'DB browser for SQlite' and see if I can spot the difference that is stopping 'Import' from working in the old catalog, but lets it work in the new catalog.

In the old days, I used to use 'Import from another Catalog' after each major update of LR, because it was very prone to leave rubbish in the catalog that upset the new version. Importing from the old catalog to the new left this rubbish behind. Haven't had to do this for a while, but there is something in the old catalog that LR8 Import doesn't like. Sychronise works fine, so I've been getting round the problem, but I thought I'd try and sort it.

Bob Frost