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Suddenly LR thinks I'm a new user

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John Little

Active Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Jul 6, 2012
Messages
207
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
LR Classic 9.2.1
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
I've been using LR 9.2.1 for several weeks without issues. Suddenly, when I opened it today, it seemed to think I'd chosen a very old catalog, and that this needed to be updated to the current format. So I picked the proper catalog. One thing I did wrong at this stage was that the EHD with the photos wasn't attached, so I closed LR, attached the EHD, and restarted LR. (FWIW, this is a common oversight of mine and it never created a problem, just a blizzard of ?'s). Now it found the files. But it started giving me "tips" as it would if I was just starting out. I can stop this easily, but I don't know why I'm getting it. Also my rearranged develop panels have reverted to a different arrangement, likely a default one. I haven't poked around yet to see what else is different.

I've read here that one way to cope with weirdness is to reset the Preferences file. I can do this but it seems like a bit of pain if there is something going on that's easier to fix.

Related question, does the catalog include things like the panel settings, or is that in the Preferences file?
 
One more thought--a couple of days ago my computer froze up and I had to reboot it. I don't recall if LR was open during the freeze-up, but it's likely. And I'm reasonably certain that I used LR since the freeze-up without any issues. Put another way, I don't think that shutting everything down put LR into an unstable state.
 
I would guess that the computer problem ended up with the preferences file being corrupted (or even deleted), so when LR was restarted it was with a new prefs file (which would explain the other problems you've encountered). If you have a backup of the prefs, you could try restoring it....but if not you'll just have to accept the situation and update your preferences as needed. The main thing is to check that your catalog is OK.
 
Photoshop did this to me today too even though I'm signed into my creative cloud account. Wonder if Adobe had a hiccup on their servers.
 
Photoshop did this to me today too even though I'm signed into my creative cloud account. Wonder if Adobe had a hiccup on their servers.
They certainly had a hiccup yesterday, as I had trouble as well.....and they even posted about it on their forums. Maybe related....
 
They did indeed have server issues. I'd be surprised if they caused issues with opening the right catalog, but stranger things have happened. Are you all sorted John?
 
They did indeed have server issues. I'd be surprised if they caused issues with opening the right catalog, but stranger things have happened. Are you all sorted John?
All sorted, thanks! Who knows where the catalog issue or the new user weirdness came from, but I'm set now.
 
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