ARGH Lightroom catalogue gone

[Bluemist]

Ok so last night i was working on maternity session and all was well I go to open Lightroom up tonight and the catalogue is gone- no prob so I find the catalogue I was using open it and it's not the right one.

I tried some others and tried recovering stuff but they arent the right ones either.
I don't know where to go with this really...as i cant find anything that resembles the catalogue I was working on last night.

SO my question is- once I just create a new catalogue which will import ALL my millions of photos again....this will loose all my tags and edits of the photos etc won't it?

 

[calaf]

Sorry if this is stating the obvious, but have you tried open recent catalog?

 

[Bluemist]

Yes I opened LR as normal but it flashed up a screen that i couldn't read and then O photos.... Anyway i just went to my last back up and re imported the photos- only about a weeks worth so no harm done I guess...just means reprocessing a few photos....better than not having the photos

 

[dbailey]

I'm always suspicious of catalogs that hold everything, just for this reason. If you lose a catalog, or it gets corrupted, you can lose a lot of effort.

In lightroom, I use sidecar files. Have LR save metadata to the file (or sidecar file in the case of file formats that LR can't touch, like raw files). I don't know how much or which information LR places in the sidecar, but at least if I ever lose my catalog I won't lose everything.

Also, backups! Make your backup procedure as simple as possible so that when something happens (and something *always* happens eventually) you don't have to beat yourself up 'cause the last time you ran your backup was 6 months ago.

 

[Brad Snyder]

Calaf meant, that on the Lr file menu, there's an 'Open Recent' command which tracks the MRU (most recently used) catalogs. If you've inadvertently got a got created in an oddball location, that'll help find it.