Catalogs Repeated crashes LRC 14.1.1, MacOs Sequoia 15.3, MacBook Pro 16 (2021) with M1 chip

[Leander]

Lightroom Version Number

14/1/1

Operating System

1. macOS 15 Sequoia

2/1/2025

Hi all,
I hope some of you can suggest troubleshooting steps.
I have been using Lightroom Classic for about 8 years, on MacBook Pro 16 for 3 years, with few problems. 95% of my work is bird photography, and I typically upload 100-2000 RAW images at a time from an SD card that I remove from the camera (Canon R5, RF 100-500 lens, latest firmware) and insert into the SD slot on the camera and upload into Lightroom and a dedicated external HDD from there. I have a library of 100,000 photos with a catalog about 8 years old with few prior problems.

Over the last month, I have updated the MacOs to Sequoia, then to additional times, now running Sequoia 15.3 since about 1/27/2025. Beginning about 1/15/2025, Lightroom began to drop 30-50% of the photos to upload. The problem has steadily worsened to not uploading any photos, and now the program crashes on opening before I even attempt an upload.
The program has automatically sent crash reports to Adobe and checked the app-reports app is fine. I have removed and re-installed Lightroom Classic. I have not tried to repair the catalog-(scared of losing all). I have posted to Adobe Community and been given this response on 1/25:

"I've located your crash report - thank you for submitting it. We already have a bug ticket open for this particular crash. Please follow this thread for future updates regarding this issue. Thank you!"
There has been no further response.

I am now at approximately 17 days of non-function and getting desperate. I would appreciate any perspective on next steps. I have had these ideas:
1. Call Adobe Lightroom technical support to see if anyone there can help me. (Does this work?)
2. Call Apple and try to wind back to an earlier operating system that is known to operate well with Lightroom Classic
3. Abandon Lightroom and try to learn Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop to import, catalog, post-process, and export my photos.
4 Abandon the entire Adobe universe and try to find another vendor of image cataloguing and developing software.
5. Abandon Mac and try to start over on a Windows computer.

I would appreciate any ideas and perspective any of you can offer.

Leander

 

[Paul McFarlane]

Did you run through the section in your Classic FAQ:

Standard Troubleshooting​

Especially with trying a new catalog?

 

[clee01l]

now the program crashes on opening before I even attempt an upload.

Have you checked for the presence of a file in your catalog folder with the ".lock" extension? When LrC crashes, the sentinel file (.lock) gets left behind. It prevents you from opening the same catalog file twice.

As for the Crashes, I would make a copy of my master catalog as a fall back for additional safety and check the following one at a time:

• Freespace On MacIntosh HD. This is where MacOS stores temporary files. Lightroom uses this working storage extensively. For proper operation of MacOS you should keep a minimum of the larger of 100GB or 10% of the disk drive free so that the OS can create temporary files.
• Delete or move your Preferences file. Lightroom will create a fresh one if the old one is not present. Many gremlins are corrected when the contents of Preferences are refreshed.
• No one except the camera manufacturer recommends using the camera as a card reader. Purchase a separate USB-C SD card reader. Preferably one that has its own power supply. Camera batteries must be fully charged and fresh to provide enough power for the camera to works as a card reader. Camera batteries have a limited life and only a certain number of charge cycles. The more you use the camera as a card reader, the sooner you will need to replace the battery with a new ($$) one. Card readers are much cheaper than batteries.
• Hold down the {Opt} key while restarting Lightroom, then click the Create New Catalog button. Once you get LrC to reliably open without crashing, try importing into that new catalog. This will help determine if your catalog file is somehow corrupt. If your master catalog is somehow corrupt we can work to fix that.
• In Preferences, try turning off the use of the Graphics processor and rebooting MacOS

 

[Leander]

These all look like very helpful suggestions. I will work through them and check back. Will probably take me 1-2 days given other responsibilities. Thank you! I did not know Lightroom Queen Forums had a troubleshooting section.

 

[John R Ellis]

1. Call Adobe Lightroom technical support to see if anyone there can help me. (Does this work?)

I don't recommend this. Adobe support is good for routine account issues and the simplest of technical issues, but they are hit or miss (mostly miss) with more complicated technical issues, and they have a reputation for making things up.

"I've located your crash report - thank you for submitting it. We already have a bug ticket open for this particular crash. Please follow this thread for future updates regarding this issue. Thank you!"

There's no guarantee, but crash conditions that more than one person has reported and for which there's an internal bug report filed is more likely to (eventually) get fixed. LR 14.2 is due in a couple weeks and hopefully the underlying problem will be fixed.

 

[Leander]

Re: John R Ellis on 2/1/2025: These are both helpful perspective comments. Thank you!

 

[Leander]

Did you run through the section in your Classic FAQ:

Standard Troubleshooting​

Especially with trying a new catalog?

Have you checked for the presence of a file in your catalog folder with the ".lock" extension? When LrC crashes, the sentinel file (.lock) gets left behind. It prevents you from opening the same catalog file twice.

As for the Crashes, I would make a copy of my master catalog as a fall back for additional safety and check the following one at a time:

• Freespace On MacIntosh HD. This is where MacOS stores temporary files. Lightroom uses this working storage extensively. For proper operation of MacOS you should keep a minimum of the larger of 100GB or 10% of the disk drive free so that the OS can create temporary files.
• Delete or move your Preferences file. Lightroom will create a fresh one if the old one is not present. Many gremlins are corrected when the contents of Preferences are refreshed.
• No one except the camera manufacturer recommends using the camera as a card reader. Purchase a separate USB-C SD card reader. Preferably one that has its own power supply. Camera batteries must be fully charged and fresh to provide enough power for the camera to works as a card reader. Camera batteries have a limited life and only a certain number of charge cycles. The more you use the camera as a card reader, the sooner you will need to replace the battery with a new ($$) one. Card readers are much cheaper than batteries.
• Hold down the {Opt} key while restarting Lightroom, then click the Create New Catalog button. Once you get LrC to reliably open without crashing, try importing into that new catalog. This will help determine if your catalog file is somehow corrupt. If your master catalog is somehow corrupt we can work to fix that.
• In Preferences, try turning off the use of the Graphics processor and rebooting MacOS

 

[Leander]

Re: clee01! Thank you for all these ideas. Just to clarify for anyone else who may be reading: I have never used the camera as a card reader. I remove the SD card from the camera, then insert it into a dedicated SD slot on the side of my MacBook. I like your advice here and I follow it.

 

[Leander]

2/2/2025
Thanks to all for great advice. I have only followed some of the suggested steps, and LRC seems to be working well now.
My takeaways:

Did not help: Close them reopen LR Classic. Reboot Mac. Update Mac and Lightroom Classic to latest releases. Checked CPU stress level: it was 80% free when uploading a 1000 cRAW image SD card.

Seemingly did help: Optimize catalog. Since going through this procedure, all aspects of Lightroom Classic seem to be working fine now on my Mac.

Lessons learned:
1) That Lightroom Classic FAQ book from Lightroom Queen I read a few years ago has a Standard Troubleshooting section. I did not think to look.
2) When hopelessly lost, re-read the manual.
3) Lightroom Queen books and forums are much more helpful than any other Lightroom Classic sites online and much better than Adobe Community.
4) There are a lot of smart,helpful people on this forum.

Cautionary Note: I may be declaring success too early. The broken behavior was intermittent for a long time. If LRC crashes again, I'll be back with an addendum. If it continues working well, I will post a progress report in 2-3 weeks saying so,

THANKS ALL!

 

[clee01l]

Re: clee01! Thank you for all these ideas. Just to clarify for anyone else who may be reading: I have never used the camera as a card reader. I remove the SD card from the camera, then insert it into a dedicated SD slot on the side of my MacBook. I like your advice here and I follow it.

Sorry, I read the following and not using a card reader

insert into the SD slot on the camera and upload into Lightroom

 

[Leander]

Sorry, I read the following and not using a card reader

Oops! Head too scrambled with ideas at that moment! Thank you!

 

[Leander]

2/7/2025
I am continuing a thread I started on 2/1/2025. I appreciate the several very helpful suggestions.

First, an apology: I failed to describe my conditions accurately. I was not importing RAW files. For about 4 months, I have been recording my images as cRAW files, not RAW files. Reviewing other posts on LQF, it looks like it should not be a problem. To eliminate as many variables as possible as possible, I will shoot only RAW in the future. Today's images in RAW seemed to import and export fine.

Since my last comments 2/2, Lightroom imports and exports seems to work fine for 2 days. Then, on 2/5:

Import upload stopped after 773 images imported. Progress bar upper left showed about 75% complete. Stayed hung up overnight. Resolved by closing, reopening LRC. See first screenshot 2025-02-05 10:59:02. When I clicked the small x at the right of the import process bar to close the operation, I got the message (attached screenshot #2) "Import Results: Some import operations were not performed. The files could not be found. (179). The files appear to be unsupported or damaged. (52) (See 2nd screenshot made 2-5-2025 10:59:34). Closed, reopened LRC again, tried importing from same SD card, same file again, got an additional 42 images from 2/5.
Tried import from same SD card, same file in my new Test catalog. This first reported "no images found" on first attempt. On 2nd attempt, LRC reports a list of unfounded images, in groups of 100. (See 3rd screenshot).

I was unable to export images from either of these catalogs on 2/5.

On 2/6, new images, still cRAW: Import operation appeared to be complete, at least no error messages, but I got an incomplete upload of 415 images in my standard catalog. In my test catalog, 560 images. After a 2nd attempt at importing the same files to my standard catalog, I got the total number of imported images up to 565 (why 5 more than test catalog? Did not study). Able to export.

Today, using RAW images, both standard and test catalogs imported 598 images without any freezes or error messages. I am able to develop and export from each catalog.

I appreciate the earlier suggestion to go through "Standard Troubleshooting" in Adobe Lightroom Classic-The Missing FAQ", pp 514-516.
Troubleshooting steps I have done::
1.The Magic Reboot
2. Optimize the Catalog
3. Check for Updates
4. Check the GPU
5. Reset Preferences
6. Try a new catalog
7. Rule out corrupted presets
10. Check for hardware and operating system problems
11. All of the steps suggested by clee01! above

Steps I have not done:
8. Rule out corrupted fonts
9. Try a clean user account.

If anyone has any fresh ideas based on these additional clues, I will appreciate. If not, my tentative plan is:

1. Try to repair my standard catalog since it sometimes seems to deliver worse importing than the new catalog.
2. Do standard troubleshooting steps 8 and 9 above.
3. try to reset to an earlier MacOs that works better with current LRC. (any ideas with MacOs that would be?)

Thank you all!
Leander

 

[Leander]

Hi all,

I thought I should contribute a follow-up to my problem, which I described in original post 2/1/2025.

After receiving suggestions here on the forum, I drew two conclusions:
1) Since no one else was saying "Me, too!", I concluded That there might be something unique about my configuration that caused my problems.
2) Since the problem was intermittent and unpredictable, I concluded that it was impractical to try to change one thing at a time and then observe for weeks for an improvement. I made multiple changes.

Hardware: My setup was: MacBook Pro 16" 2021 with M1 chip, an OWC Thunderbolt 4 docking station, a 5 meter (16.4') Cable Matters active Thunderbolt 4 cable from the docking station to a usb active hub in a cupboard, and external Western Digital HDDs connected to the active usb hub. I had been using both SD cards plugging directly into an SD slot on the MacBook, and CFExpress cards attached via card reader with usb-c cable to the MacBook.

Hardware changes:
1. Eliminated Cable Matters long cable.
2. Eliminated active usb hub. Two external HDDs (where I store all images on one and backup images on the other now plugged directly into OWC docking station of MacBook via usb-c connections.
3. Now using only SD cards, not CF Express.

Software changes:
1. Backed up MacBook with Time Machine and Acronis True Image, then completely reformatted the MacBook. Took 3 support calls to Apple to downgrade to older operating system Sonoma 14.7.4 from Sequoia 15.3._. Once I had the older operating system, Time Machine did a great job of easy install all my prior apps, documents, preferences.
2. Organized all my images in a date hierarchy YYYYMMDD on one external HDD using Mac Finder app.
3. Backed up this image collection, in clean, date hierarchy in a separate, newly formatted ext HDD.
4. Uninstalled, re-installed Lightroom Classic app on the MacBook. Updated to latest release
3. Created new catalog in Lightroom.
4. Catalogued my entire lifetime photo collection (120,000 images) via Lightroom Classic using the same YYYYMMDDHHSS-custom numbering sequence, leaving all photos in their same storage location.

Outcome: Everything has worked well for more than a month, with close to 10,000 new photos imported.

Conclusions:
1. I am happy I rolled back the MacOs to Sonoma, since the automatic updates to Sequoia were the change closest in time to development of my problem. I will probably wait 6 months, then try updating to Sequoia again.
2. Eliminating the long Thunderbolt 4 active cable is a strong contender as the problem-solver. This cable appears to be pushing the limits of current technology and other users have reported data integrity problems using it. However, I used it for more than 8 months without problems.
3. Starting over with a new catalog was easy for me because I have essentially no presets and images I have processed in Lightroom were exported after processing to a new location. My use of Lightroom Classic so far has been primarily for file organization, with only a small amount of image processing. I really don't know whether this helped. Every time I checked for integrity of my prior catalog it passed the test.

Thanks again to all for helpful comments!

 

[Leander]

Addendum: I never looked for corrupted fonts or started with a clean new user account. Just could not get enthusiastic for those two recommended steps.

 

[Paul_DS256]

If anyone has any fresh ideas based on these additional clues, I will appreciate.

Coming to this late, and glad you've found a resolution.
In the future, also check any plug-ins you may have.
Also, I no longer use the exFAT file system for external. It does not support ownership and priv's and has been a source of many problems.

 

[Leander]

Coming to this late, and glad you've found a resolution.
In the future, also check any plug-ins you may have.
Also, I no longer use the exFAT file system for external. It does not support ownership and priv's and has been a source of many problems.

Thank you, Paul! Will take note. Although I did use ExFAT in the past, my HDD's are now formatted as APFS< the Apple File System. A compromise for me because I also use Windows, but I'll cross that bridge when I have to.

What kind of plug-ins are you thinking of? All plug-ins on the MacBook? Some subset?
Thanks.

 

[Paul_DS256]

What kind of plug-ins are you thinking of? All plug-ins on the MacBook? Some subset?

LrC Plug-ins.

 

[Leander]

LrC Plug-ins.

Thank you, Paul. Never thought of that. I do have Topaz Labs DeNoise AI installed in LrC. If I have any further problems, I will remove that. Appreciate the tip.

 

[Gnits]

It might be worth going into Manage Plug-Ins and see what is actually installed. There is an option in there to disable individual plugins.

Recently I found a bunch of PlugIns I did not recognise. I removed all plugins that I could, disabled others and left the two plugins I use regularly.

 

[Leander]

It might be worth going into Manage Plug-Ins and see what is actually installed. There is an option in there to disable individual plugins.

Recently I found a bunch of PlugIns I did not recognise. I removed all plugins that I could, disabled others and left the two plugins I use regularly.

Thank you. Will check.