Two problems with keywords after re-importing photos in a new catalog: #2, "zombie" favorite keywords

[fabrizio.giudici]

As mentioned in the forum, in December I re-imported all my photos in a clean catalog to fix a problem with thumbnails. I now see that in the "Favorite" keywords panel I have some "zombie" entries: that is, all the keywords I originally had now are present but not working. The contextual menu can be opened, but does nothing (so I can't remove them). I manually added again the keywords to be able to use them, and now I have duplicated entries (see the attached screenshot). Please let me know how to remove them. Scratching the whole favorites set would be ok, I could manually add those I need in a few minutes.
Thanks.

Screenshot 2024-01-16 at 16.49.17.jpg (62.99 KiB) Viewed 2683 times

[Hert]

Find Catalog Labels in the Categories section.

[fabrizio.giudici]

"Zombie" keywords are not shown in the Categories section: I can only see the new counterparts.

[AlainB]

Few weeks ago I realize that one of my PSu catalogs was corrupted and I recreated it by reimporting the files (NEF, JPG and XMP, with XMP created using IDimager ICS scheme. I group NEF and JPG files inside versions sets). The result is far from perfect, and I pent hours trying to correct the many mistakes I found. Some sets have lost their description. Some have lost their Location, or their author. To have a neat catalog I would have presumably to start from scratch (erasing all XMP files)

[fbungarz]

I guess the problem here might be this:
We all expect that a catalog can be re-created from the XMP metadata and that is how PSu advertises itself. But what happens if a catalog gets corrupted? Reading what Alain and Fabrizio experienced got me thinking...

In theory re-creating the catalog from XMP should work well:
(1) you have auto-sync enabled with the ICS schema to be written to the files, thus, presumably all the information to re-create the catalog is embedded right there inside the images
(2) something goes wrong, you simply discard the old catalog and create a new one by telling PSU to read the metadata and ICS from the files and boom - back to normal

Now, I seems I have been rather fortunate that I never had to try whether this actually works...
Too me it seems quite possible that a corrupted database may inadvertently write metadata to the files which simply reflect the corrupted info from the catalog. Then, when once you try re-creating that catalog from the metadata the new catalog might be just as bad or even worse than the old one you just discarded.
Obviously, this may depend on how badly your catalog is messed up. A database that is completely corrupted won't even start anymore, PSu trying to load that file will simply be unresponsive. But not noticing some odd ways how keywords are being assigned, thumbnails not showing up correctly, problems with versions - one may only notice this after having already worked with an existing catalog for a while. And than the corrupt catalog info may have already been written to the files.

I now wonder how likely this scenario actually is.

There is that saying that you can actually only be sure whether a backup actually works, once you had to use it. I think ICS is a fantastic idea, the idea to be able to built a catalog from the metadata in the files. But it looks like this must not be confused with a true backup of your database.

[AlainB]

IMHO the best way to recreate a PS catalog is to use a backup (supposing you have such a backup).

You can either use the backup restore pair of commands of PSU, performing a new backup periodically.

You can alternatively use a backup of the cat.db and thumbs.db files (using Time Machine on OSX or a similar utility).

I am not aware of the differences, if any, between these two methods.