Lightroom Keeps Losing My Keywords

Question

I use Lightroom 1.2 and CS3. This is my workflow:
1) I import my images from a CF cards to a directory on hard drive.
2) Open Bridge to sort and white balance my images.
3) Open Lightroom to assign keywords to all the images. The keywords are the one feature that I REALLY like about Lightroom.
4) Sometime later (another day) I go back into Bridge/CS3 and do some editting with ACR.
5) When I go to Lightroom, it detects that metadata has changed. The images have that rectangular icon.
6) When I click on the icon I get this dialog:
"The metadata for this photo has been changed by both Lightroom and
another application. How should Lightroom synchronize this data?"
with the following three options:
Import Settings from Disk
Cancel
Overwrite Settings
So if I choose to import the settings from disk (to pick up the Bridge/CS2 edits), Lightroom removes the keywords that I have previously assigned.
Now that is REALLY DUMB. So are we talking metadata or keywords. They are kept separate in the panels and should be kept separate during this process.
I don't know if this is related to the XMP Performance Issue or not. If I uncheck auto-write XMP Lightroom flies and gives this message.
If I check the auto-write option (isn't this supposed to fix this?), my machine grinds almost to a halt. It is so slow that I don't know whether this dialog even appears. I don't even see the icon.
Just to make matters worse, I don't know how many images have no keywords assigned. Now that would be a really great feature for the keyword search.
My computer is a dual processor PowerMac G5 with 3.5Gb RAM with 127Gb free space on the catalog's disk and 11,000 images.
Any comments or solutions?
Match

Answer 1

The problem in your workflow is that second step of editing the previously edited images that were keyworded back in Camera Raw...why would you do that? Lightroom has all the controls that Camera Raw has (except a point curve editor). At some point you'll really need to decide where you're going to do you main editing and stick with it. Either that or you're gonna go nutz trying to keep the metadata correctly updated and yes, ALL the metadata gets updated when you see that warning and go ahead and update...it's doing exactly what you told it to do...in spite of the fact that's not what you really want as there is no way to separate settings from keywords or other metadata.