“It is critical to understand that Lightroom will always take its own database to be correct,” says Victoria Bampton, raw processing guru and self-dubbed “Lightroom Queen.” (And rightly so!) In case you’re not clear, Bampton is talking about the fact that when working with images in a LR catalog, LR will always refer to the most recent changes that were made in LR, even you worked on images more recently in another program.
Huh?
What this means is that if you update any metadata — from keywords to develop settings – in any other program besides LR (such as Adobe Bridge or Adobe Camera Raw), LR will not be aware of those changes. Considering that many of use do use multiple programs to work with our image, you can see how we could quickly end up with a very big mess.