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Lightroom CC won't open - corrupt catalog

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Regan Kilpatrick

New Member
Joined
Aug 6, 2016
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Location
New Zealand & San Diego, California
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
I have just decided to get the Adobe Creative Cloud and it seemed to be installing fine. Adobe Creative Cloud App installed onto my computer then I installed Lightroom.

When I try open lightroom, its asks me to select a catalog, there's one option so I select it. I then get a message saying "The Lightroom catalog "Lightroom Catalog" is corrupt and cannot be used or backed up until it is repaired".

I select "repair catalog"

It loads for about a second then a message appears saying "Lightroom encountered problems reading or writing from disk when attempting to repair "lightroom Catalog""

When I select "try again" I get the same message.

Any suggestions??

Thanks for the help!
Regan
 

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What version of Lightroom did you use before? Lightroom should ask you to upgrade the catalog if you used a previous version. Do you make backups?...
I had Lightroom 6 (the stand alone version) before I decided to go ahead and get Creative Cloud as I wanted to start using photoshop aswell. No I hadn't been making backups in Lightroom 6.

Sorry, I'm not the best with these kinds of things!
 
As your computer probably contains more valuable stuff than just a Lightroom catalog and images, I strongly advise you to buy an external disk and start making general backups. Remember that Lightroom can only backup the catalog, it never backs up your images. And it obviously doesn't backup anything else, like your address book, your email or whatever.

As Lightroom gives you an error saying it can't read or write to the disk, you may be lucky. Maybe the catalog is not corrupted, but somehow the catalog folder got locked. Try copying the catalog to a different folder, and see if Lightroom can open that one without giving you the same error.
 
As your computer probably contains more valuable stuff than just a Lightroom catalog and images, I strongly advise you to buy an external disk and start making general backups. Remember that Lightroom can only backup the catalog, it never backs up your images. And it obviously doesn't backup anything else, like your address book, your email or whatever.

As Lightroom gives you an error saying it can't read or write to the disk, you may be lucky. Maybe the catalog is not corrupted, but somehow the catalog folder got locked. Try copying the catalog to a different folder, and see if Lightroom can open that one without giving you the same error.
Thanks for the advice! I do have an external hard drive that I backup on to but I had never backed up my Lightroom catalog onto it.

I tried doing that and it came up with an error message saying "the Lightroom catalog cannot be opened because it is not valid".
 
That's bad. Victoria has a contact at Adobe that can sometimes repair a corrupt catalog, so perhaps she can help. Otherwise, you just learned the hard way why making backups is a vital part of computing, I'm afraid.
 
That's bad. Victoria has a contact at Adobe that can sometimes repair a corrupt catalog, so perhaps she can help. Otherwise, you just learned the hard way why making backups is a vital part of computing, I'm afraid.
I just saw her Lightroom Quick Start Guide... I wish I had red this earlier!! Only myself to blame for that. Do you know how I could get in contact with her? Thanks so much for your help.
 
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