lost access to pictures

[micdon]

LR2 was running very slow last night and I was having problems deleting images I no longer wanted to keep. so instead of removing from disk (Thank God) I switched to remove from Catalog and somehow all pics must have been selected and when it completed, all the pics were gone. I do not have a back up, but you know how that goes, first thing on my list after this is fixed and I have tried relanching the catalog from my lightroom folder, etc, but no luck

Is there a limit on the size of a catalog?

appreciate any help

running on a Vista 32bit Quad 4 machine with 4gb

 

[Brad Snyder]

micdon, welcome, sorry you're having trouble.

Without catalog backups, you're probably doomed. Two questions:
a) did you ever do the built-in backup procedure that's offered when Lr starts-up?
b) did you ever 'Save Metadata', either via menu, Ctrl-S, or auto-write settings?

Search your hard-drives for files of type *.LRCAT, just in case at some point you did a) above. If you find *.lrcat files, and the dates make sense, you can just double-click on them to see if their contents are reasonably up to date. (Don't forget if you have the 'open most recent catalog at start-up' option set, that this will change the default which opens.)

There's some absurd limit around 2 billion images as the theoretical maximum size of a Lr catalog. The practical limits depend upon your system hardware, yours is middle of the pack. Folks report successfully (but slowly) handling 2''k+ images. You should be OK high into 5 figures on image count. (You don't reveal disk space available)