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Repair of corrupted catalogs

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Tomiron

New Member
Joined
May 28, 2012
Messages
3
Location
Sweden
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Trying to open a corrupt catalog of mine makes LR freeze forcing me to kill the actual LR-process to proceed. I also need to delete the preference files to start LR again. It is not possible to import any data from the corrupted catalog to a new one. (My latest backup catalog works just fine though, but lacks quite a few hours of work...)

Is there by any chance a way to check integrity or do any other kind of catalogue repair of corrupted catalogs that doesn't open in LR? If I'd been more of a tech-pro I'd might been successful in using sqlite3 or sqlite analyzer to check the database. Now is that not the case..

I'm aware of that holding down the Alt-key (on Win) or Opt-key (on Mac) while simultaneously clicking on the LR icon in the dock cause LR to open but not to open the default catalog. Instead it shows a dialog with a list of available catalogs and an option to create check integrity of each catalog. In my case - this doesn't work. If I choose my corrupted catalog following this procedure this will still cause LR to crash.

Working in LR 4, Win7 64 bit, 4GB RAM, accessing catalog and previews from an external drive, images stored on a multiHD-NAS.
 
Hi Victoria,

that sounds great. How was it possible to upgrade as my LR always failed to?
Regarding the ? nil-messages: They happened in two cases:
  1. I have an LR plugin named Duplicate Finder. As soon as I start it, I get this kind of error message and it was resproducable since two years - hence I didn't use the plugin anymore since then. There was no specific action I performed before it failed for the first time. But I guess this was when the problems with the catalog started but it had no other negative effect until the upgrade.
  2. Since approx. 3 weeks, I tried to clean up old pictures by marking them with an "x" ("Abgelehnt" in German, no idea how it's called in the English version). After that, I filtered for these and deleted them by marking and removing from catalog and disk at once (normally, bunches of 20-50 were handled that way). This worked normally in every case but at the end of the operarion, it showed also the ? nil-message without any further negative impact.
I hope helps finding what happende there.


Thanks again and best regards,
Matthias
 
Ok, magic is always fine for me. I was just wondering if there was something I could have done or something I did wrong. But as my magic is a bit rusty, it seems asking for help was the correct way.

Best regards,
Matthias

Gesendet von meinem ONEPLUS A6000 mit Tapatalk
 
You didn't do anything wrong, the catalog not upgrading is a (relatively rare) bug. I suspect there's something more in that catalog that's preventing the catalog import - maybe the ghost images issue we've intermittently seen - but that's still under investigation.
 
Hi Victoria,

I have to add one occurence of the ? NIL-value message: It happende just now with LR9 and the new catalog you sent when I tried ti synchronize the folder status (Imoprt new / delete missing / sync metadata) directly before showing the import dialog with the new pictures identified.
Furthermore, with the new catalog, all pictures are shown as "changed metadata" and I'm currently importing the metadata back from the disk. It's not a big issue as things are restorable but nevertheless, it might help investigating.

Best regards,
Matthias
 
Maybe one additional question as the catalog is basically working but has a lot of issues:
I'd like to create a new one from scratch. For the photos, this should be no issue as the metadata is stored on the disk directly. But for the videos, I didn't find any solution to carry over the metadata to the newly to-be-created cataloig. Is there any idea you can think of?
What I tried: Mark all videos, export as catalog and import afterwards. This fails as the import does not work ...
Manuel carryover is a pretty bad solution as I have more than 1000 videos and it would take forever.

Thanks again and best regards,
Matthias
 
For that folder that gives you a nil value error, if you scroll through the thumbnails, can you find any that have no metadata showing? If that is the cause of the error, there is a fix available.

Importing the metadata back from the disk will overwrite the catalog with external data. Are you sure that's what you want to do?

Other than those two noted issues, what other issues are you seeing that makes you want to start over?
 
Good morning Victoria,

the idea of starting from scratch mainly came from the fact that there are still problems with the current catalog and I have no idea if there will be a solution as it seems to be a pretty rare issue. But of course, it's not the perfect solution and I'll keep on thinking about it.

The funny thing for all the metadata: It shows the statu of being not current but when I import from disk, it's fine but doesn't change the content. I normally write every change of metadata to the xmp or jpg-files directly - only for videos, the metadata status on the disk is different from the database status.

Regarding your first question: The nil-value in most cases happens after deleting. So there is no picture available at that moment on the screen as all picture were deleted. But I can investigate a bit further if there are thumbs without metadata.

Best regards,
Matthias
 
OK, some interesting news from my investigation:
The catalog you, Victoria, upgraded for me works in general and the problem with the "Lightroom duplicate finder 2"-plugin (? nil-value-error) is gone. So I decides to stick with it.
Sometimes, when deleting files, there is still an error message (? nils-value) but it seems to happen less often now.

What is still not working (but also not needed, at least for the moment):
As I had the plan to start with a new catalog and the metadata of the photos are on my hard drive, I just tried to export all the videos to a catalog. This worked but importing them to a new catalog failed as you mentioned above, too.
As next steps, I tried to narrow down the conflicting video and split up the export in single batches (always halfening the amount of videos).
Example:
Code:
Round 1:
Export videos 1-1000 - Import failed

Round 2:
Export video 1-500 - Import failed
Export video 501-1000 - Import worked

Round 3:
Export video 1-250 - Import worked
Export video 251-500 . Import failed

and so on and so on

What turned out finally: The import of all export worked well except for one with 10 videos. I exported each single video then into a catalog and imported to a newly created catalog - and this also worked. I double-checked with the 10 video-batch and it failed again.
So I'm pretty much surprised about this behaviour as it seems like not a single file/video is causing the issue but the combination of some videos and eventually the additional data (keyword, smart collections, ...).
None of the videos in the 10-videos-batch had visible problems with metadata missing in the original catalog.

For the photos, I didn't repeat this procedure as it's pretty time-consuming.

Does this help in any way understanding the issue?

Best regards,
Matthias
 
Hello

I am new to the forum. I've landed here because i has searching on how to fix a a corrupted Lightroom Catalog. I tried using sqlite, but no chance.. I'm a photographer btw.

Thanks, Bogdan
 
Hello

I am new to the forum. I've landed here because i has searching on how to fix a a corrupted Lightroom Catalog. I tried using sqlite, but no chance.. I'm a photographer btw.

Thanks, Bogdan
Welcome to the forum. We will do our best to get you back up and running
What messages are you getting with the catalog file? When did you last create a backup catalog file?
 
Welcome to the forum. We will do our best to get you back up and running
What messages are you getting with the catalog file? When did you last create a backup catalog file?

I didn't made any backup for this catalog. I was working with smart previews and catalog from my external HDD when lightroom crashed.
The error: Unexpected error opening catalog.
 
I didn't made any backup for this catalog. I was working with smart previews and catalog from my external HDD when lightroom crashed.
The error: Unexpected error opening catalog.
I should have asked: what version of Lightroom are you running and what version of which Operating system? How many images do you think were in your catalog? How long have you been using this catalog file?
So If I understand correctly, you did not make the standard catalog file copy on exiting Lightroom and you have no system backup app running to protect you and all of your critical files from file corruption or the eventual failure of your primary hard drive.

Could you open the file with the SQLlite database manager?

Most often the best solution is to recover from a recent backup catalog file. (This is one reason that Adobe puts the backup process in the file Exit process. It should not be ignored).

If we are unable to help you via the standard solutions, there is someone at Adobe that Victoria does have a relationship with that might be able to repair your corrupt catalog but this is a last resort option and I do not hold out hope that it would even be successful.
 
I am using Lightroom CC, OS: windows..
In my catalog there were about 3000~ pictures from a wedding. I was using it for like 1 month .. i had just that wedding on my catalog.
I've created on my desktop, created smart previews and copy all that folder from my computer to external HDD so i can edit from my laptop when i'm on the move.. I have backup only for my raw images, no backup for catalog.

i tried to create a sql from lrcat with sqlite3, but after i did all that, i had some errors: sqlite_stat4... i have deleted those rows and created my LRCAT again with sqlite but i can't open it in lightroom... i'm getting assertion failed message , but only with that catalog. The others are working fine
 
i tried to create a sql from lrcat with sqlite3, but after i did all that, i had some errors: sqlite_stat4... i have deleted those rows and created my LRCAT again with sqlite but i can't open it in lightroom... i'm getting assertion failed message , but only with that catalog. The others are working fine
. The file that you created with SQLlite is probably damaged because you did not know or follow the SQL structure. You will need to send the ORIGINAL "lrcat" file that gave the original error to Victoria. Her source at Adobe does have the necessary understanding of the catalog structure to repair it if that is possible.
 
Hi. I have a corrupted catalogue that opens for a few minutes (2-5minutes) then will close again and say that it is corrupted. I have a backup that is recent but I dont want to lose all of the 300 or so photos I just took for a friends wedding ceremony. Is there any way I can send it to you guys to have a look at?
 
Hi. I have a corrupted catalogue that opens for a few minutes (2-5minutes) then will close again and say that it is corrupted. I have a backup that is recent but I dont want to lose all of the 300 or so photos I just took for a friends wedding ceremony. Is there any way I can send it to you guys to have a look at?
I have sent the catalogue via wet transfer for you guys to look into if you can thank you.
 
I have a backup that is recent but I dont want to lose all of the 300 or so photos I just took for a friends wedding ceremony.
Just to be clear - I hope you realize that you won't lose the photos if you use a backup catalog, you will only lose any edits you have made to those photos. The photos themselves are not stored in the catalog. Worst case scenario is that you would have to import the photos again into the restored catalog.
 
Just to be clear - I hope you realize that you won't lose the photos if you use a backup catalog, you will only lose any edits you have made to those photos. The photos themselves are not stored in the catalog. Worst case scenario is that you would have to import the photos again into the restored catalog.
I had not backed up in about 2 days and had a session on the corrupt file that was not backed up in that time. I do not have the photos to reimport
 
I had not backed up in about 2 days and had a session on the corrupt file that was not backed up in that time. I do not have the photos to reimport
Got your catalog, and I've forwarded it to Adobe to see if they can fix it. However, prbimages is absolutely right, it would only have contained the edits. The photos wouldn't have been in it. What do you mean by "I do not have the photos to reimport"?
 
Got your catalog, and I've forwarded it to Adobe to see if they can fix it. However, prbimages is absolutely right, it would only have contained the edits. The photos wouldn't have been in it. What do you mean by "I do not have the photos to reimport"?
Now I'm confused are you saying the pictures are not located in the catalog. only the edits?
 
A catalog is just a text database, with some small previews alongside. Photos are never "in" Lightroom, they're stored on your hard drive wherever you chose to put them when you imported them.
 
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