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Catalogs How to reset "Select a recent catalog to open"?

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process

Active Member
Joined
Jun 10, 2013
Messages
231
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
6.x
Lightroom Version Number
6.14
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
When you start LR while holding down ALT (on a Mac, I don't know if it's the same on a PC) a window pops up where you can select different catalogs, and the recent ones are listed.
This usually works fine, but as I've changed hard drives and my file structure the paths are all wrong (pointing to my old copies and not the current ones).

I would like to remove those entries and choose the correct paths instead but couldn't find any way to do that. Is there a hidden method for this, or a separate configuration file from LR itself that I can delete? I'm on LR 6.14 (Mac)
 
AFAIK they should be automatically removed. Maybe you need to start Lightroom with an existing catalog before that happens.
 
Neither worked unfortunately.
The old entries are still there.
 
I did however find those paths inside a preference file located here:
~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Preferences-Lightroom 6\ Startup\Preferences.agprefs

But disabling it (renaming or (not recommended) deleting) didn't help and showed me the exact same catalog, so it must be coming from somewhere else too.
 
I also tried something new: unmounting the old drive (where the catalogs I'm not supposed to use any longer reside). This time those entries were all gone.
But when I mounted the drive again they reappareared the next time I started LR with the ALT key down.
I'm sure there's a setting somewhere, but where?
 
So if I understand you correctly, the entries point to existing catalogs, but old ones? That is why the list does not get cleared. Lightroom checks if the entries are valid, and if they are not it removes them. The solution is to make the entries invalid permanently. Remove the old catalogs, rename them, or rename the folder where they reside.
 
You're right! By renaming the unused catalogs (or a folder which is part of its path) they no longer appeared.
But as soon as I renamed them back they reappeared again. Perhaps there's a cache that needs to be cleared out to make it completely disappear.
At least that solves my problem, and in the process helps me distinguish the old vs. the new catalogs (I added an "_old" to the old catalogs' names).
 
I assume that the paths get permanently cleared after a certain time. Lightroom probably keeps the paths just in case the catalog was only temporarily unavailable, for example because it’s on an external drive that wasn’t mounted. This probably gets stored in the regular preferences file, which is not the one you found, but this one: Macintosh HD / Users / [your username] / Library / Preferences / com.adobe.LightroomClassicCC7.plist
 
On Windows they are stored in the preferences file, and that was true on Mac too. I don't think they ever get cleared unless you reset preferences. While one can hack the preferences file on Windows, I've no idea how one can do the same now on Mac.

John

Screen Shot 2020-07-06 at 19.26.00.png
 
On Windows they are stored in the preferences file, and that was true on Mac too. I don't think they ever get cleared unless you reset preferences. While one can hack the preferences file on Windows, I've no idea how one can do the same now on Mac.

John

View attachment 14925

You can edit the Preferences file in MacOS too. I have not looked at LR6, but LR7 -list is no as clean as the Windows Preference files that you show.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
LR will need to be closed when you do this.
I was able to open the plist with LrC open. I agree that you would need to have exclusive write on the plist file if you want to change it outside of Lightroom Classic.
 
You can open the file when LR is open, but LR writes preferenes when it quits and should overwrite any changes. And you definitely need to backup the preferences before touching the file.
 
I assume that the paths get permanently cleared after a certain time.

You were quite right!
The old paths went away after a day or so (and haven't re-appeared). I don't know if it's because I didn't use them within a certain time limit, if they weren't available for a certain amount of time or something else, but they're gone now.

I prefer not to hack into preference files as thing can easily go wrong (talking from experience), but if the above hadn't happened I might have had to.
 
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