I am having a similar issue. I am importing data from an outside source to populate my meta data. They show up when editing, but not on the post until I update. I compared the post_meta data before and after the update and am adding the same fields that get added on save, but they still are not showing up until I physically hit update.
In my case it’s a repeater field and I have the following data
photo_slider
_photo_slider
photo_slider_0_photo
_photo_slider_0_photo
photo_slider_1_photo
_photo_slider_1_photo
etc….
What else am I missing. Is there something else I need to update for ACF to recognize the data for output?
