PhotoScribe v1.6.1

If you use a newer "reasoning" model such as Gemma 4, this release is worth taking — it fixes photos failing outright, and makes generation several times faster.

Fixed

• "Couldn't read metadata" failures with reasoning models are fixed, and generation is much faster. Newer models (Gemma 4 and similar) run a hidden "thinking" pass before answering. That reasoning was consuming the entire response budget — measured at 840–1200 tokens for a single photo — so the model was cut off before it finished writing its JSON, and the leftover scratchpad got reported as an invalid response. Reasoning is now switched off explicitly, which took a test photo from failing twice in a row to succeeding first time, and cut a request from roughly 1,400 tokens to 140 (59s to 9s).
• A photo that fails is now retried with a bigger budget rather than the same one that just ran out, and if a response really is cut short the log says so plainly instead of blaming the JSON.
• Response length options raised to 2048 / 4096 / 8192 tokens, so models that ignore the no-thinking flag still have room to finish.
• The place name reliably reaches the title and caption again, instead of only the keywords. The location was being framed defensively ("don't name a different place") rather than as an instruction, which a model without a reasoning pass tends not to act on — in testing the place name appeared in only 1 of 3 captions, and now appears in every one. It also now prefers the recognisable town or locality over a street address, so a Sublocation like "Geering Street 41" no longer ends up in the title.
• No more duplicate XMP sidecars. If a sidecar already existed under the other naming convention (photo.xmp vs photo.cr2.xmp), PhotoScribe wrote a second one — so Lightroom kept reading its own file, never saw the new metadata, and any star rating or colour label in it was stranded. It now writes to whichever sidecar already exists.

Note on star ratings

PhotoScribe does not remove star ratings or colour labels — verified for both embedded files and existing sidecars. If ratings disappear after Read Metadata from File, it is because Lightroom replaces the catalogue's values with the file's, and the rating was only ever in the catalogue. Use Metadata → Save Metadata to File before running PhotoScribe and the rating will be in the sidecar, where it is then preserved.