Strange problem with the catalog affecting collections, keywords, folders.

[Alex R]

Two problems, I think, related.

Right after I upgraded to 2.3 a few weeks ago, I opened LR and all my collections were gone. I closed LR, and spent the next two weeks (I was away) unsuccessfully searching for answers through different forums. When I got back and opened LR again, everything magically re-appeared and LR has been fine up until yesterday.

Over the last week I've been working on adding new and renaming old keywords, reorganizing collections and, to a small extent, folders (from LR). I was saving metadata back to the files pretty meticulously. My LR has been open all these days until I finally closed it last night. Today, when I opened it, my catalog was missing all my edits from yesterday, and from yesterday only (a deleted folder from both LR and disk is back as "missing", files have old and deleted keywords as does the Keyword List). Closing and reopening LR hasn't had any effect so far. I looked at some of the jpeg's with the Explorer and they show all the latest keywords (I'm using Vista 32 bit).

Anybody has any ideas or suggestions?

Thank you.

 

[Kiwigeoff]

Sounds like you may have two catalogs going.
Look in the File menu>Open recent and tell us what is there please.

Welcome aboar Alex, you seem to have arrived a a quiet time - thanks for filling in your signature, it really helps us help you!!

 

[Alex R]

There are two catalogs in there (one from LR, one old from PSE), but only the LR catalog has a check next to it, so I assume it should be the only one active.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Hi Alex, welcome to the forum!

I'd try searching your hard drive for *.lrcat files and just check you haven't got multiple files around. I'd also check your main backup program, as a long shot, because I've seen a two-way sync sync the wrong in the past, so it's worth checking!!

 

[Alex R]

I don't have a backup program, so that's not a problem.

I searched for the *.lrcat files and found several of them in backup folders, one in another Windows profile, and one from PSE. Just to be sure, I renamed those from PSE and another profile so they won't be found by LR. (And I'm sure backup catalogs are fine, since I'm sure a lot of people have them as well.) It didn't help but i wasn't expecting it to help.

I don't think it's a catalog confusion problem, since LR has been working fine for almost a week without being closed and reopened and without the catalog being reloaded, backed up or optimized. It only lost my changes of the last day from its database. All the other changes from the previous days are fine. (I should mentioned, just in case, my machine does go to sleep mode after an hour of inactivity.)

Another interesting thing is, some of my files show an up arrow in the upper right hand corner that says the metadata has been changed externally from LR. But not all files whose metadata is now different!

 

[Victoria Bampton]

And Lightroom didn't crash when you last closed it? And you haven't deleted a *.journal file next to the catalog?

I'd be concerned about low grade catalog corruption, so I'd probably make sure I had regular backups, and consider transferring into a clean catalog or going back to a backup. Things shouldn't just going missing!

 

[Alex R]

LR didn't crash, and I didn't delete anything - I know better. And looks like I lost more than just the last day worth of changes.

Some time mid-week I selected a good subset of my images (they are jpg, tiff, CRW, CR2 and DNG) and did Ctrl-S to save all metadata to files and got an error message that some data failed to be written (it would be nice for the message/LR/Adobe to specify for which files). I didn't pay much attention, since I was going to go over individual folders, fixing the keywords and saving metadata, anyway, which I did. Now, yesterday, while looking over my collection in LR trying to assess the damages, I noticed a few files with an icon in the upper-right hand corner that says the metadata failed to be written. (I didn't notice them when I was going over each folder.) So, I'm not sure if these failures are the result of catalog problem, or my catalog problem is the result of those several files failing to save properly.

Anyway, I decided to read all the metadata from files back into LR. (Well, first I tried to "Synchronize", but that didn't help.) It did it pretty successfully. All the files then got the down arrow which meant the metadata in LR was different from that in files. (Why? Shouldn't the files be synchronized by now?) So, to be sure, I selected all and did Ctrl-S - this time without any error messages. Then I fixed my main keywords, added missing synonyms, doing Ctrl-S for each folder. Then I backed up my catalog, optimized and relaunched it, and backed it up again. Now things seem to be fine. For now.

I'm concerned about this type of catalog corruption, too, of course. But how do I transfer data to a clean catalog? I can read the metadata from files, just like I did now. I can re-create my collections, too. But not everything is stored in metadata, is it? What is and what is not, does anybody know?

Thanks for all your help, people.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

When it fails to write, you should be able to press Show in Library to see which ones. Not being able to write is usually down to file permissions, but it could be a catalog error.

For a start, I'd do Optimize in Catalog Settings dialog, and I'd probably run a backup with 'Test Integrity' turned on, to see if LR can find and fix the problem.

If the problem appears limited to one or two folders, I'd consider starting a clean catalog and do import from catalog from your old one into it. That'll transfer everything, and then possibly just do a normal import for the problem folder and rebuild odd bits of that. Or you could ask Dan Tull nicely....

 

[Brad Snyder]

Missing from XMP: Collection membership, Stacks, Virtual Copies, Pick Flags, Stepwise Develop History, image pan positions, panel on/off switches. Here's a post I wrote (mostly from stuff I learned right here in this forum.)

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Alex, I caught Dan Tull on Twitter yesterday, and he didn't think corruption was likely (as that would usually cause LR to crash when trying to read the data, rather than it just disappearing), but wasn't sure what could have caused the problem. He thought that your read from metadata was probably a good idea, and wasn't overly concerned that your database is about to explode. Let's hope that solves it!

 

[Alex R]

Thank you, Victoria, very thoughtful of you. I would like to hope it fixed it, but somehow I'm a bit skeptical. As I've been going through my folders and files again and checking the keywords and making some small changes, I noticed that I don't get this "down arrow" that indicates the metadata is changed in LR and is out of sync. But maybe it's because it takes some time for LR to "think"? I noticed, though, when I did Alt-Number to assign keywords, the arrow did appear - strange, eh?

Btw, I did optimize the catalog after reading metadata from files back into LR, and I always have "Test Integrity" checked when backing up.

So, now I'm thinking of creating a new catalog either by exporting to a new or importing from an old (any difference?). Brad, your link was very helpful and useful, thank you. Is that the exhaustive list?

Does anybody else have any ideas/links about what would be missing if I a). create a new catalog and just read metadata from files; b). import/export to a new catalog?

 

[Victoria Bampton]

Import/export as catalog - you don't lose anything.

XMP - Flags, virtual copies, collection membership, Develop history, stacks, Develop module panel switches and image pan positions are not stored in the XMP.