Lightroom before/after not working after using exiftool on an edited photo

[.jan]

Apologies if this has been answered before, I've tried searching if anyone has posted something similar but couldn't find anything. Also not sure if this is the right place to post this since this may be a Lightroom question.

Issue:
I'm using exiftool just to update time tags, and I've noticed that if I use exiftool on photos that I've already edited in Lightroom Classic, the before/after functionality in LR does not work i.e. pressing '\' does not show what the original photo looks like. All of the edits are still there (sliders remain where I left them), and I can reset my edits to get my original, but the before/after just doesn't work.

Reproduction steps:

• Edit photo in Lightroom
• Press '\' and see original photo correctly displays
• Save metadata to file from Lightroom
• Use exiftool to adjust DateTimeOriginal with -overwrite_original
• Read metadata from file from Lightroom
• Press '\' and see original photo does not display, the edited photo stays displayed

Other notes:

• I've tried both -overwrite_original and -overwrite_original_in_place and the issue still occurs (not really sure what the difference is)
• This also occurs when I use the Capture Time to Exif Plugin which uses exiftool
• These are the commands I'm using:
  
  Code Select Expand
  exiftool -DateCreated="" -TimeCreated="" -DateTimeOriginal="2023:02:25 00:00:00" -IPTCDigest=new . -overwrite_original_in_place
  Code Select Expand
  exiftool '-DateTimeOriginal+<0:00$FileSequence' . -fileorder filename -overwrite_original_in_place
• I've confirmed that this issue happens on both mac and pc

Any ideas on how to fix this/work around it?

[greybeard]

Its interesting that you get the same problem if you skip using exiftool and edit the xmp file directly - just changing the date created in the xmp file (and importing) has the same effect.

The obvious workaround is to change your workflow and make any metadata changes first - before any Lightroom edits.

[.jan]

Yeah that is what I will do moving forward. The thought of adding correct metadata to my film scans came to me after I had already edited them.