Missing Library Catalogues and Identity Plate

[tedf8]

New to most of this - so would welcome any help.
Opened Lightroom v 1.3 yesterday as usual - all library catalogues and information gone! Also my identity plate had reverted to default setting. Develop and Library presets seem OK. I can probably get things back on track but I wonder if I've done something wrong - so I can avoid this happening again.
Regards

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Ted, welcome to the forum!

Your identity plate is stored in the catalog, which explains why that's gone walkabout too.

It would be interesting to know where your catalog's gone though! Could you have deleted them by accident? Can you still find them on your hard drive?

Are you Mac or PC based? (Could you fill your system specs into your signature please, helps us give much more specific advise! Thanks!) If you're PC based, I've heard one or two reports of catalogs going missing after anti-virus software got its hands on them... might be one place to start looking!

 

[dellgonzales]

Ted,
I had a similar problem when updating to version 1.2 Without getting into which OS you are running, search your hard drive(s) for *.lrcat If you find it, great! You can then select File / Open Catalog in LR and you should then be back in business. For some reason, though I hadn't moved my LR catalog, it wasn't found by LR 1.2 Manually opening it the first time did the trick. Hope this helps you.
Regards,
Dell

 

[Mick Seymour]

Preferences

The only times I've seen Lightroom behave like this are when the preferences file goes missing. This can happen by removing it accidentally or deliberately or by logging in as the wrong user, one who hasn't used Lightroom before. The location of your default catalog is stored in that file. If Lightroom can't find the users preferences file it creates a new one and builds a new empty catalog in the OS and user specific default location.

Is this likely to have been the case Dell and Ted?