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Can LR re-create a catalog?

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CapeCodFrank

CapeCodFrank

New Member
Joined
Mar 24, 2020
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Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
9.2
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
A few weeks ago, I discovered that I could not create a slideshow. LR will pause building the preview and never complete. I "fixed" this by creating a new catalog and importing the old one. With this new catalog, my slideshow problem is fixed. However, my published collections in my original catalog didn't convert over to the new catalog. Now I am wondering if I can ask LR to rebuild the old catalog? If I could do that, perhaps the slideshow problem would go away, and my published collections would be left intact.
 
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What do you mean with ‘rebuild’? If you still have that catalog, then first try to optimize it.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
What do you mean with ‘rebuild’? If you still have that catalog, then first try to optimize it.
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I do have the catalog and I have optimized It. I was wondering if there was a way to use LR or a third party tool to verify the integrity of the catalog, kind of like Disk First Aid. There must be something in that catalog that is causing LR to fail to make a slideshow.
 
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Johan Elzenga said:
If you quit Lightroom and let it make a catalog backup on quit, Lightroom will verify the catalog. If it finds a problem, it will try to repair it on the next start.
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Ok, thanks. That has been run several times, so I guess my hypothesis that there is something wrong with the catalog is false. There must be something else going on that prevents LR from building a slideshow from the old catalog. I think I'll start a new thread seeking help on my original problem and see where that leads. Thanks fore your help.
 
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ffernino-comcast said:
Ok, thanks. That has been run several times, so I guess my hypothesis that there is something wrong with the catalog is false. There must be something else going on that prevents LR from building a slideshow from the old catalog. I think I'll start a new thread seeking help on my original problem and see where that leads. Thanks fore your help.
Click to expand...

Sorry to point this out, but sometimes the simpler explanation may be the best. If something goes wrong building a slideshow, it may well be that the problem is building the slideshow - not that there is a wider problem with the catalogue.

I have experienced problems building slideshows in certain situations. The main one has been when Pan & Zoom and Zoom to Fill Frame are both enabled, when the slideshow contains portrait as well as landscape format images. My theory is that something is wrong in the sizing calculations. I would suggest disabling one or both settings, then seeing if the slideshow will build. Or remove the portrait format images (including landscape format ones which have been cropped to portrait).
 
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Hi,

ffernino-comcast said:
I was wondering if there was a way to use LR or a third party tool to verify the integrity of the catalog,
Click to expand...

The Lightroom catalog is actually an SQLite database. So you can open it with any SQLite compatible tool. I use SQLite Expert Personal 5 which is free. You can use it to check the database integrity and do a lot of other things.
 
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johnbeardy said:
Sorry to point this out, but sometimes the simpler explanation may be the best. If something goes wrong building a slideshow, it may well be that the problem is building the slideshow - not that there is a wider problem with the catalogue.

I have experienced problems building slideshows in certain situations. The main one has been when Pan & Zoom and Zoom to Fill Frame are both enabled, when the slideshow contains portrait as well as landscape format images. My theory is that something is wrong in the sizing calculations. I would suggest disabling one or both settings, then seeing if the slideshow will build. Or remove the portrait format images (including landscape format ones which have been cropped to portrait).
Click to expand...
I first encountered the problem as I was trying to build a slideshow from recent vacation photos. I have several collections of the photos, all different types: raw, jpg, HEIC. LR repeatedly failed in building a preview of the collections, handing on building a preview of one of the slides. The slide is hung on was different each time it ran. I created a new catalog and imported my old one. All the standard collections made the trip. And using this new catalog, I had no problem building slideshows. So, I don't know what is causing the problem, but it doesn't seem reasonable to me that it is the images themselves. Thank you for your help, and if you have any ideas, I am all ears. I would love to go back to using my original catalog, as it has lots of published collections as well.
 
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It's not really the images' file types that cause the problem, it's their dimensions. LR's slideshow building code would need to use heights and widths to calculate the Zoom to Fill and especially the Pan and Zoom. My view is that Adobe's ZtF and P&Z code includes some small calculation bugs which can result in slideshows hanging, and I think this particularly when there's a mix of portrait and landscape format images. So I could export a slideshow with only landscape orientation pictures, but it would hang as soon as I included one that was portrait orientation. You might want to test this for yourself.

I also suspect that ZtF and P&Z produce massive files, which might hit memory problems, but there's little about Slideshow that would cause a problem back in the catalogue.
 
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johnbeardy said:
It's not really the images' file types that cause the problem, it's their dimensions. LR's slideshow building code would need to use heights and widths to calculate the Zoom to Fill and especially the Pan and Zoom. My view is that Adobe's ZtF and P&Z code includes some small calculation bugs which can result in slideshows hanging, and I think this particularly when there's a mix of portrait and landscape format images. So I could export a slideshow with only landscape orientation pictures, but it would hang as soon as I included one that was portrait orientation. You might want to test this for yourself.

I also suspect that ZtF and P&Z produce massive files, which might hit memory problems, but there's little about Slideshow that would cause a problem back in the catalogue.
Click to expand...
Well, the elimination of portrait images allowed me to build the slideshow. Thank you so much for your help. I hope this bug will be fixed in the next release of LR.
 
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Did you have ZtF and/or P&Z enabled?

I reported the problem to Adobe a long time ago, so I don't think it will be fixed for ages.
 
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