No more Lightroom release candidate installs for me

[JohnZeman]

This thread has very little to do with IMatch 5 other than for a few hours I thought I was hot on the trail to an IMatch metadata time bug.  I'm posting this in case anyone else runs into a similar metadata problem.

Short story:  As much as I like Lightroom as a raw converter I am never going to install a release candidate of it again.

And the long story is why.  Today I found several thousand JPG images in my IMatch database that had the wrong shooting time.  I can tell in a glance if the date or time is wrong because before importing I rename all of my images in a way that indicates the date and time each was taken.  In the problem images the date was always right but the shooting time was off, usually by several hours.  Not only that once I found an image with the wrong shooting time there was usually a block of images beside it that had the exact same wrong shooting time.

At first I thought it was an IMatch problem, I'd correct the shooting times with an ExifTool script I have that parses my files names to restore the correct timestamps.  But the next time I did a metadata writeback to those images the wrong time once again replaced the correct time.  I tried everything I could think of and then I created a couple ExifTool metadata dumps, one of a good image timestamp, one of an image with a bad timestamp.  As I compared the two dump files I found several time related errors in the bad image.  That was my first clue that maybe the problem wasn't in IMatch at all.

So using Lightroom 5.2 (not the release candidate) I re-exported some of my problem images, copied categories, attributes, ratings, etc to those new exports and what do you know?  All of the timestamps are correct and are staying correct.

Then I went back and checked which version of Lightroom I'd used when I'd had the bad timestamps.  Every one of the bad images was exported by a release candidate of Lightroom.  Every single one of them, some from the latest release candidate 5.2RC.

Sooo...  I ain't never gonna install another release candidate version of Lightroom again.  Ever.

[Mario]

I can only comment on such problems in other software if IMatch 5 is bug free...
(Although... I guess that Adobe has a much larger development and test team than just 1 x Mario)

[Ferdinand]

I have a feeling that this is not the first time that there's been a date/time issue caused by LR.  Perhaps that was also a beta.  Was quiet a while ago.