This is a soft-ball i think but i can’t find a clear answer and figured i’d try to check before making the change in case i break something.
I have a few custom fields i assign to media items that i use as pick list “select” (dropdown) menus to assign metadata to images.
I’ve got a few hundred images with metadata assigned this way and i realize that i want to do 2 things:
update (edit) some of the field names
reorder the field name choices in some of the pick lists
What i’m curious about it whether this will have any impact on the items that already have data assigned to them.
For example: if i currently use, “Camera Lens 1” as one of the pieces of metadata and i want to change that to “Lens 1” will the images currently set with “Camera Lens 1” keep that metadata or will they automatically update to “Lens 1”
This probably comes down to whether the metadata is stored as text based on my selection at the time, or whether it references the choice options as variables – and i don’t know how it works.
The answer to this probably answers my second question which is: What happens if i re-order the choice selections or introduce/remove choices in the future.
You can change field labels but not field names (slugs) without losing the connection to previously entered data.
For example, if you have a text field with label “Camera Lens 1” and field name “camera_lens_1” you can change the label and the new label text will be shown in the templates where this label is used. But if you change the field name it will not update the old data in the database, so you would start with an empty list again. The old data isn’t lost, it’s still in the database, but it won’t be accessible unless you change the name back to the old one.
I hope I’ve understood your question correctly. For more specific answers you’ll have to post your field setup exactly.
