Broken Catalog

[chris_11]

Lightroom Version Number

6.14

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi there,

I really hope you can help me please, have uploaded through we transfer already and would much appreciate some assistance please.
I do have a backup but every back I have is since discovering a problem, my latest is 8 days ago so I have a "working" copy but.....

For some months I have had a problem where accessing some keywords (or some combination) results in the keyword panel showing "loading" and not being able to progress further. Definitely keywords, everything else works. I do encounter keywords that have a photo count but no photos show (or an incorrect count) so I wonder if there is a linkage issue in howeve the database stores the data.

I have been re-keywording into a hierarchical structure (if you get that far they are the top level ones starting with an underscore to differentiate for now).

However, today when opening the catalog, lightroom appears as a background process and does not display to me, this was after the latest of it's "I'm not playing ball anymore on keywords".

Other catalogues, if opened first are no problem, I can then change to this catalog but I get an incomplete display (no photos, the library panels on the right hand side appear partially drawn and not populated with data).

The first question is can it be rescued please?

But perhaps the more important question is are you able to identify what they keyword issue is and is it fixable - I've spent many frustrating hours try to solve the issue, photos that have been rekeyworded appear ok but i's haphazard trying to fix what's outstanding, would very much like to change to a newer version of lightroom but cannot see the point of moving if my catalog is already damaged.

Any help greatly appreciated, thanks

Chris

 

[Victoria Bampton]

It’s Saturday night, replying on my phone… but the good news is that might not be so bad!

Deletions are easy, the photos will be marked as missing in the March backup so they’ll be easy to remove from the catalog.

You might be able to export just the recent photos data to a new catalog from the corrupted one, and import that into a copy of the backup.

Then it’s just the keyword cleanup to repeat… sorry.

Out of interest, did you optimise the catalog or check integrity any time since March? I’m wondering if there were any warning signs… if not, it’s definitely an area to improve (although LR6 is old… could be extra stuff has gone in since then…)

 

[chris_11]

Yes get a life! Surely you have better things to do on a Saturday evening than talk to me

Yes maybe worth a go, and yes integrity checks and optimisation was set as a daily on exit but I wasn't keeping that many historic copies and all were affected once I realised.

Is there a way to identify photos that have been updated in lightroom since a date by any chance? It's not just deletions, I've been working through tweaking (mind you I have been using colours so perhaps there might be the glimmer of a plan because there will be a lot less of those), well I know what I am doing tomorrow!

Thanks

Chris

 

[Victoria Bampton]

You could try an edited-since type smart collection perhaps

 

[chris_11]

Chipping away at it, turns out I do have a range of backup catalogs backed up so I have worked backwards (tedious, great that my backups work but takes about 20 minutes just to make a list of files and can only restore 1 at a time!) but have gotten back to just before I deleted 3000 files of the 19,000 and I cannot so far replicate the problems I have seen.

Managed to then import the photos to a new catalogue (it crashed at the end of the imprt but catalog appears fine so going with it for now) and working through deleting the photos that have been deliberately removed. Doing the whole lot in one go caused a crash the catalog to have a problem so working through in batches and about half way through I have a crash.....but I kept a copy of this library so will back up the stages and reload lightroom in case the problem is something caching / memory related rather than a file.

Would love a miracle cure but at least it feels like I'm going forwards for a change.

Ha, ha why have one disaster at a time, all I can say is whilst we don't have hot water we have got heating

 

[chris_11]

Update in case anyone wants a laugh.
I have worked through my backups until I found a catalog that appears to function.
That version was just before I deleted 3000 photos, so I am working back through removing photos from lightroom to bring things in line.
But I have one missing photo that when I remove it from the catalog lightroom crashes (just closes instantly).
I've tried to connect the record to a photo that can be deleted and that makes no difference.
Skipped the file and deleted some other pictures....I haven't finished yet but subsequent photos appear to remove.
Turns out my crashes align with an error in event viewer and all are lightroom FaceRecoognition\libfrsdk-8-6-0.dll , I have never used facial recognition and it's definitely turned off so a bit frustrating!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Odd. Thanks for the update. If you give the problem photo a keyword to identify it, I might be able to remove it manually.

 

[chris_11]

I've managed to work around it & it clearly isn't the only thing broken in that catalogue, but last night I worked through and deleted around 20 catalogs I have tested to get to a reasonable state.
I now have a clean & working catalogue (as far as I can tell) and have 146 photos left to sort out - that turned out to be a pain because an edited after smart collection gave me every single photo that was at the top of a stack so didn't help much but the photos I was working on were all in one smaller collection so a manual check has narrowed it down an I'm going to work through by hand for these and see which will export / import succesfully.

Nearly there, it's been painful but forced some tidy up activity.

Thanks for the help.