“The Lightroom catalog is corrupt and cannot be repaired.” Words that strike fear into Lightroom users worldwide.
Catalog corruption is very rare, but if you’re the unsuspecting victim, that’s no consolation. But don’t worry, it’s very easy to restore your most recent catalog backup. That’s why you create backups, after all!
How often should you back up your catalog?
First, we should briefly talk about backup frequency. If something went wrong, how much work could you afford to lose? A month? A week? A day? Go to Edit menu (Windows) / Lightroom menu > Catalog Settings to check and update your backup frequency. If you’re not already familiar with Lightroom’s catalog backup, click here for a quick introduction.
One warning – whenever you do any significant renaming or rearranging of photos or folders, go back to that dialog and select ‘When Lightroom next exits’ from that pop-up and then quit Lightroom. That will run a backup on-demand. Backups with different folder structures or filenames are a nightmare to restore, so it’s worth spending a few minutes preventing problems.
While we’re talking backups, check you’re backing up all the other Lightroom files too.
Restoring a backup catalog
So imagine the worst has happened, and Lightroom is telling you it can’t repair your corrupted catalog. You have a folder overflowing with backups, but what do you do with them? Let’s walk through it step by step.
- Close Lightroom.
- Find your catalog on the hard drive. By default, the catalog will be stored in a Lightroom folder within your main Pictures folder, but you may have chosen a different location. The catalog ends in .lrcat – that’s LRCAT.
- Create a subfolder called something like ‘corrupted catalog’ and drag your corrupted catalog into that subfolder. You can delete it later, once you’re back up and running.
- Find your catalog backups folder. By default, they’ll be in a Backups folder next to your catalog, but you may have chosen a different location in the backup dialog.
- Inside the Backups folder are a series of subfolders. The name of each subfolder is the date and time the backup was created. Open the most recent backup folder and inside it you’ll find a zip file holding your backup catalog. The zip file will have the same name as your catalog, making it easy to identify.
- Double-click on the zip file to open the backup. The *.lrcat file displays next to the zip file. Note: if you’re on a Mac and your catalog is large, double-click might not correctly unzip the file. In this case, download StuffIt Expander from the App Store (it’s free). Open the app and drag the backup zip file onto the icon to unzip it.
- COPY that backup catalog back to the usual catalog folder. There are 2 reasons we’re copying it, rather than opening it in its current location. Firstly, it’s easy to forget where your catalog is stored if it’s buried deep in a backup subfolder. Also, you don’t want to work directly on the last good backup, just in case you do something wrong. Working on a copy means you can restore from this backup again.
- Once the catalog is back in its usual location, double-click on it to open it into Lightroom and check that everything’s back to normal.
- If your backup was really out of date, there may be additional cleanup to do, including re-importing and re-editing newer photos and removing references to photos you’d deleted. If you get stuck with the cleanup, feel free to post on our forum and we’ll guide you to the right conclusion.
Before you do anything else, go and check that your catalog backups are recent. You could even run a backup on demand now, and practise restoring it, so you don’t panic if you ever see that dreaded error message. To do an on demand backup, go to Catalog Settings > General panel and change the backup frequency temporarily to ‘When Lightroom next exits’.
For extensive information on Lightroom Classic, see Adobe Lightroom Classic – The Missing FAQ.
If you have the Photography Plan, then as well as Classic you have access to the Lightroom cloud ecosystem including the mobile apps and web interface. For more information on these apps, see Adobe Lightroom – Edit on the Go.
Note: purchase of these books includes the first year’s Classic or cloud-based Premium Membership (depending on the book purchased), giving access to download the latest eBook (each time Adobe updates the software), email assistance for the applicable Lightroom version if you hit a problem, and other bonuses.
We also have a special bundle offer for the two books. This includes Premium Membership for the first year as described above for the whole Lightroom family!
Originally posted 20 March 2014, updated July 2021.
The upgrade process duplicates the catalog before upgrading the copy, so if you’re going back to LR6, you’ll need to open the LR6 version of the catalog. That said, I’m sure we’ll be able to get you going on Lightroom Classic instead… why not install it again and then tell us exactly what it says when you try to open it. Probably easiest to troubleshoot on the forum rather than here… there’s a link in the menubar.
My LR Catalog was left in an inconsistent state and now I can’t even open LR. This happened because I upgraded LR6 to the online version because it wouldn’t support files from new Mirrorless camera. What a disaster. I have un-installed the online version, just trying to get to the work needing to be done in LR6. Any ideas?
You are my life saver. I tried to re-organize my photo folders. So I moved them around and synchronized the folder – then all edits were gone. I’m glad that I will have those catalog backups and was able to get those edits back… I will read more of your articles to learn how to properly relink photos with edits to re-organize the folders. Thanks a lot, you are so so so so, so great.
Synchronize Folders will just effectively import ones that aren’t in that folder in Lightroom – so they are like a fresh import. We wrote a blog explaining:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/synchronize-folder/
Great you could go back though!
Here’s a blog we wrote about relinking:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/
Safest (unless moving entire disks) is organizing within Lightroom, then it doesn’t lose track of where things are.
I hope you can help Victoria!
Lightroom does not open my catalog anymore. Unexpected error opening catalog. Tried all possibilities. I tried to restore from my most recent back and still have the problem. The back-up was from 2 days ago.
Are there more possibilities to repair the catalog?
Can you go further back trying a backup?
Post details on our Forum (so we know the OS, Lightroom Version) and we’ll see if we can assist.
Hello! I’m trying to restore my LR catalog and have an issue I have not seen described here.
I was using the old stand alone version of Lightroom on my old Mac when my internal HD crashed. All my photos and my catalog backup were on an external drive, so I have everything. But of course I can’t use that old version of LR on my new machine, so I loaded the LR subscription version.
But when I try to migrate the backed-up catalog, I get an error that tells me to fix the catalog in LR Classic first, which of curse I don’t have access to. I also can’t replace the new catalog in the Pictures folder with the backup, because the new catalog is a different format:
New catalog that was created when I launched subscription Lightroom: Lightroom Library.lrlibrary
Old catalog from backup: Lightroom 3 Catalog-2-2-2.lrcat
What am I missing here?
Thanks!!
Chrissy Wiley
You got tripped up by Adobe’s naming convention, along with a lot of the rest of the world. Download Lightroom Classic rather than Lightroom, and that’ll be able to upgrade your catalog. From there, you can decide whether you want to use the cloud-based Lightroom ecosystem or the traditional folder-based Lightroom Classic. Customer Services can help you switch your subscription if you had the wrong one. Here’s a post that’ll help you decide which is right for you: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-cc-vs-classic-features/
Thanks Victoria. I used to work at Adobe and wrote some of the original LR documentation, and the subsequent move to the cloud-based platform has frustrated me from day one.
-c
Oh wow, you really do know the history then. I suspect Lightroom Classic will be the way to go for you then. I love the cloud ecosystem because I can pick up any of my devices and work on my photos, but it does get complicated when you try to add Classic into the mix too.
The problem is I had been running this ancient stand-alone version on my 7-year-old iMac when it crashed. I didn’t want to pay monthly since the old version worked just fine. To your point, they managed to make it very confusing to know which version I needed.
Anyway, I had support change me over to the Photography plan and I think I’m all set now. Thanks for your help!!
-Chrissy
Hi Victoria. I found your article recently but I don’t really understand it. I have just updated my mac to the latest operating system which caused it to crash. Apple very kindly repaired it for me but had to erase the drive. I have re started it from my back up time machine but Lightroom CC wouldn’t open. I saw that an upgrade was waiting to be installed from the creative cloud and then I had a message saying that my catalogue would have to be upgraded in order to work with the new version. I clicked the ok button and got a message saying my catalogue was damaged and couldn’t be upgraded. I now cannot access photos in this catalogue. Is there a way to restore this as I have all of last years pictures on it? Including my sons wedding. Thanks in advance for your help. Mike.
It sounds like there was some damage done to Lightroom / catalog when you had the crash. Try restoring from one of your backup catalogs:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/restore-backups-2021/
Hi Victoria, Great article. Thankyou so much for putting it together.
I have a question. I’m constistently getting corrupt catalogues on external SSD drives. 2 different physical drives now, different cables and usb ports. Any thoughts on what might be happening here?
Andy 🙂
Catalogs work fine on external drives, including SSD’s (I do exactly this myself). are the drives self-powered? They are best externally powered to ensure consistency of supply.
omg… thx sooo much! still a relevant article after all these years 😉
Matt
This was extremely helpful and very clear. Many thanks!
Are you still there Victoria? I found a solution.
Copy the copy, it renames with a higher number and it opens. Likely will not back up. At that point it likely wont open until I copy that copy…an endless loop.
I’m not quite following you Ron, something sounds odd there.
Thanks for helping! Really appreciate it.
What’s the current method for this in CC? The only thing in that folder is the MCAT which doesn’t work if you go from one LR install to another since the GUID is different.
https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom/lightroom-cc-catalog-manual-backup/m-p/10921729?page=1#M24406
If we’re talking MCAT’s, we must be talking about the cloudy version formerly known as CC. If that becomes corrupted, you simply delete and let it download from the cloud again.
Thank you so much Victoria!! Mojave iOS went pear shaped and took catalog apart – back up used to solve thanks to your clear instructions!! Hope Christmas is kind to you 😉
help needed Victoria!
Lightroom does not open anymore. Unexpected error opening catalogue. Tried all possibilities. Oldest backup also has this problem. Opening with ‘option-key’ and trying ‘repair also does not work, it cannot be repaired. Creating a new catalogue is no problem, so the program seems to be ok. Strange thing, although I have not many pictures (400), the catalogue file has grown to over 4 GByte.
Are there more possibilities to repair the catalogue?
Regards, Mayra Pama
How old is the oldest backup? And the most recent one? When you say the catalog is grown to over 4GB, is that the lrcat file or are you including the previews in that?
thank you Victoria for your answer. I asked a photo-colleague for help, and at least we could make a fresh start, we are hopefull the original problem is solved. And his English is better than mine, in fact he typed this answer to send back to you.
With the catalog file-size, we meant the catalog file itself, not including the preview data.
I hope the problem is solved, although we could not use the previous catalog-file anymore and none of the backups.
Since I am beginning as a photographer, that is something to accept for now, although I hope this does not happen again.
These were the steps we went trough.
First we started with a new catalog-file, and imported a couple of pictures.
Only after a couple of edits, the program became extremely slow again and started to crash regularly.
Then, based on information from forums (and your log), the idea was that for some reasons, the preferences had been corrupted.
So we took the advice to delete them and restart, also again with a new catalog file.
Testing was short so far, but things seem to work better now, crossing fingers..
We have decided to delete the old catalog-file, including the backups.
They may still be available in the waste-bin, but our idea is not to look into them anymore
and to proceed with the current setup.
Before we deleted them we tried for a final time to start up Lightroom with one of the backups,
but that appeared to be impossible.
Still strange that Lightroom can create a backup that has an unrepairable error.
If you would want to have someone look into it, we could check if there is still a copy in the waste-bin.
For me, I am ok now and will certainly get back to you when the problem would return.
Appreciate very much that you reacted.
regards,
Mayra
Oh well done for figuring it out. Since old backups are also failing, check the drive integrity. It’s very rare for catalogs to corrupt except for hardware problems.
Hello Victoria,
My large master catalog (105000+ photos) has an odd problem. Whenever I open the catalog, via the “Select Catalog” and check the “[x] Test integrity of this catalog”, it reports a “Corrupt Catalog Detected”. So I click “((Repair Catalog))” and proceeds to repair reporting “Updating catalog file format” and “Optimizing catalog” and finally it reports that the catalog has been successfully repaired.
Everything in the catalog seems to be in order. No missing files. All of my keyword consistency checks are fine. Even if I do nothing other that exit Lightroom and reopen the catalog with “[x] Test integrity of this catalog”, it still reports a “Corrupt Catalog Detected”.
I can find nothing else wrong with the catalog. If I open the catalog without selecting “[ ] Test integrity of this catalog”, it opens just fine.
When I perform a backup, I always check the “[x] Test integrity before backup”. The backup goes through “Checking catalog integrity” and reports no errors.
NOTE: This started happening when I “upgraded” to “Adobe Lightroom Classic CC” and I was forced to upgrade my catalog format.
In the past it was my habit to open with “[x] Test integrity of this catalog”, unless I was in a hurry. So my catalog remained in good order. I also did this check prior to “upgrading” to to “Adobe Lightroom Classic CC” and all went well.
I am using the latest “Adobe Lightroom Classic CC” (version 7.0.1) on macOS version 10.12.6 (16G1036).
Should I be worried about this condition? Any advice on how to deal with the open catalog integrity test that always fails?
Thanks in advance and thank you for your excellent newsletter!
— Landon Noll ^oo^
That would make me wonder if there’s some hidden problem there. Are you syncing to the cloud or using Publish Services? If not, I might be inclined to use Import from Catalog to pull all of the data into a clean catalog. It often leaves gremlins behind.
Hello Victoria,
I am not syncing to the Adobe Cloud and I am not using the Adobe Publish services.
Question: In general, it is a good idea to do open often with “[x] Test integrity of this catalog”?
My thinking it that it is better to know early that the catalog needs to be repaired,
than to find out the hard way later on.
It is possible that “opening with the integrity test” may have a bug.
Observe that when I make a backup and check the “[x] Test integrity before backup”
no integrity errors are reported before the backup is made.
Opening the catalog appears to be “OK”. Other than the open with integrity
error message, all seems OK. Nevertheless there may be some gremlin I
do not yet see.
I guess it is also possible that the “[x] Test integrity before backup” has a bug.
Perhaps it does find an integrity error before making the backup but the
integrity error message is not displayed.
I will try to create a brand new catalog and import the catalog: keeping the images
in their original location and see what that does. I will try tonight and let you know
what I find.
— Landon Noll ^oo^
Yes, early warning of possible corruption can only be a good thing, even if it turns out to be a false alarm.
I’m having serious problems with lost or highjacked/encrypted files on. LR3. I know LR3 is out of date, but I lost heart, and interest in digital photography when this occurred, which is why I haven’t updated.
If I give you details, can you help me?
Hijacked or encrypted files?! Sure, post it on the forum as we can chat more easily there. https://www.lightroomforums.net
Hi Jenny, you may be able to answer a Lightroom question I have been pondering for some time now.
I have one quite large catalog holding all of my files, some 40,000 images, I have to run this master catalog off an external hardrive as I am travelling and my small laptop does not have enough capacity to hold the files on the internal hardrive.
I have a couple of backup solutions that I use, firstly I copy the entire folder off this hardrive and store a copy on yet another external hardrive, this I feel is a good solution but of course the copying of the files from one drive to another takes hours as the file is so large, never the less that is what I do, I don’t know if there is anyway to do a partial update every month or so from my main external drive to this second drive, so I just delete the second copy and start all over again, slow but effective.
My second backup solution, and this is where the question arises, is I have my camera set to shoot both raw and jpeg files, once a month I copy the jpeg files to my cloud account along with a zipped lrcat backup file, leaving my raw files with the Lightroom on the external hardrives as my working images.
All this seems to be fine except, as I mentioned, I’m travelling and have my laptop and both external hardrives with me, in the event of a theft or lost luggage or both external drives going down at once everything will go in one disaster, however, I have the jpegs and the catalog backup stored in the cloud right, yes, but here’s the question, the catalog references the raw files, the cloud has jpegs, if I open the stored backup catalog and then start to try and re-import the jpeg images the file extensions names are different and Lightroom will not recognize them, is there anyway of overcoming this.
Thanks
Ross
So,
Hi Ross. Backup or file sync software would allow you to just do a partial update of the files that have changed. I use Chronosync on my Mac or Vice Versa on Windows, but there are loads of options out there.
You’re absolutely right, no easy way of linking the catalog with the JPEGs. One possible solution might be to convert the raw files to DNG at import, and rather than sending JPEGs to the cloud, you could export lossy DNG files to send to the cloud. They’d about the same file size as JPEGs, but they’d quite happily link up with your catalog (same dng extension) in the event of a disaster. They’d also have more editing flexibility than the JPEGs. It means your computer doing a fair bit more processing, but you could leave the various conversions running overnight.
Hi Jenny, thank you so much for getting back to me.
I will most definitely look into a file sync software program as a solution to my partial update query, I’m on a windows platform so I’ll check out Vice Versa as a starting point.
As far as linking up a backup catalog that references raw files with my cloud based backed up jpgs, my raw files from the past year are actually in .DNG format, previous to that they are in the Olympus native .ORF, I started converting them on import a year or so ago when I updated from Olympus to Fuji.
So, I could start to try and upload those .DNG files to my cloud and replace the jpg files stored there, I was using the jpg as smaller and more manageable files, as well, my cloud storage recognizes the jpg files and I can actually see the thumbnail previews, the raw files I just get an icon and cannot see the file itself which is annoying. I’m not sure what lossy export is but will look into that as well and give it a go.
Thanks again for your helpful suggestions,
Ross
You’re welcome (and I’m Victoria, by the way! LOL)
Yes, lack of previews would be the downside to using lossy DNGs. (Note the lossy DNG’s you’d output for the cloud are different to the lossless ones you’ve currently converted).
The lossy export basically applies JPEG-type compression to the copy of the DNG file, so the file size shrinks massively, almost down to JPEG sizes, so ideal for uploading to the cloud.
Victoria, hi, (Jenny! where did I get that from, so sorry), thank you for getting back with all your tips and knowledge, I very much appreciate your help. I have begun the task of exporting lossy DNG files out of lightroom and into my cloud account, I think this will be the long term solution to my backup storage. The lack of a preview is something I will just have to live with and perhaps a technology upgrade down the road will fix this.
Thanks again
Question:
Lately, my main catalogue has become slow to the point of useless. This happened suddenly about five days ago.
I created a new catalogue, which works just fine, so I think the issue is a corrupted main catalogue, but I’m not positive.
It looks too like I have several catalogues: this is what I found;
Four folders:
Master Catalogue-2 Previews.lrdata and MC-2-2 Previews.lrdat, and MC2-2-Smart Previews
Then I have Master Catalogue (1,844,660 KB),
MC-2 (5,227,116 KB),
MC2-2 (8,303,952 KB),
MC2-2.lrcat.lock;
MC-2-2.lrcat-journal;
MC-3.lrcat.loc;
MC-3.lrcat-journal,
MC-3-4 (1,842,032 KB).
These are on an external HD
I don’t know why I have those or what they mean.
MC-2-2 is the super-slow catalogue. I haven’t tried to open the others.
I don’t know (yet) the location of the catalogue I just created – the working catalogue.
What say you about this morass? Should I open one of those catalogues and import all the others into it? Do I risk importing a bunch of problems?
Thanks!
Ok, let’s just identify the files first:
*.lrcat are the catalogs (SQLite databases) which holds all of your settings. Never delete those unless you’re certain you don’t need them. Those are the ones we need to sort out.
Each of those catalogs may each have additional files starting with the catalog name:
*Previews.lrdata and *Smart Previews.lrdata contain your standard and smart previews. These can be recreated as long as you have the original files, but it’s a bit of a pain, so don’t throw them away on a whim.
*.lrcat.lock is a lock file that’s created whenever you open the catalog. It protects the database from being corrupted by multiple users attempting to use it at the same time. If Lightroom is closed and the lock file remains, you can safely delete it. It can sometimes get left behind if Lightroom crashes, and may prevent you from opening the catalog again.
*.lrcat-journal is a very important file that you never want to delete, unless you’re also deleting its associated catalog. It contains blocks of data that are in the middle of being rewritten. When Lightroom opens, it checks for a journal le to update any incomplete records.
So you first need to figure out which of the catalogs contains your work. It sounds like it’s the MC-2-2 catalog that’s suddenly slow.
Next, I’d wonder why that’s slow. If you watch the Activity Center (click on the ID plate) when it’s going slow, does it say it’s doing something? And I’d be wondering what specifically is slow, for example, opening folders, trying to edit specific photos, that kind of thing.
One thing you could try is creating a new empty catalog, going to File menu > Import from Another Catalog and pulling the records into the new catalog to see if that suddenly runs faster. The downside is Publish Services and sync data don’t transfer to the new catalog, so it might just be an experiment for the minute, to see if it helps.
Hello, I have my catalog in an external drive, and for somewhat yesterday it shutted down in the middle of a Lr session, since that Lr give me this message “Lr encountered an error when reading drom its previem cache and needs to quit. Lr will attempt to fix this problem the next time it lauches” But in the next time it gives me the same error.
I already tried to launch a back up. The first one directly from the zip file, and another one from a copy that I pasted in main folder, which replaced the old catalog. All of them gave me the same error.
Is any hope for me?
Hi Nuno. Try the steps in this post: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/articles-page/lightroom-says-preview-cache-corrupted-fix/
Ok, HELP! I have not received the corrupt catalog message, but I just seemed to have “disappeared” around 300 photos. I found maybe 8-10 .Ircat files on my Mac and didn’t really know what they were. When I clicked on one, it opened in Lightroom 4 and showed me one of my images. I went to close Lightroom and I backed it up as usual. When I reopened Lightroom a few minutes later, I only had 76 photos, instead of about 4 to 5 times that many. What I have done and how do I get back to my complete catalog? I looked around Lightroom, but didn’t see anything that helped.
ok, disaster averted. I tried File>Open Recent, and found Lightroom 4 Catalog.Ircat and then File>Open Catalog and now I have 1009 images – more than I remember, but it’s a lot better than 76!
Well done Steve!
Sorry this is the latest CC version of LR.
I have had a corrupt catalogue and after following what is recommended here cannot open the restored catalogue. I get a mesaage that it will nit do do due to an unexpected error. Crisis. Please help.
Any idea what caused the corruption Marc? Was the backup stored on the same drive? Which LR version – is it a zip file or straight catalog that you can’t open?
Hi Victoria. Thanks for getting back to me. No idea what caused the corruption. I had just backed up. The backup was stored on the same drive as the catalogue. It would seem that all files are there and accessible too. I’m desperate as this catalogue has over 100000 images, pretty much all my LR images. I followed the instruction for disasters to the letter. I also tried the prior backup, same result.
Just try restoring the backup to a different location temporarily, to see if that’ll let you open it.
Unless I misunderstood, I copied the backup file to another location, not where the initial catalogue and backup were stored and then tried to open from that location. Same problem.
I’ll drop you an email to get a copy of the catalog so I can test it here.
Lightroom 6 says cannot find catalog…when I manually open the correct catalog the previews are their…but all the files have ? symbols…and will not let me develop the images because they cannot be found. The images have never been moved from their original location since they were developed. Please help. Thanks
I’m guessing you’re on Windows and the drive letter’s changed. See here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/
One other way to “backup” your catalog is to save metadata to files sometimes. True, it takes ages with dng files and it doesn’t save all catalog data (folders, history, …) – but it’s a failsafe to restore develop and crucial metadata even if the .lrcat database is lost. Even if you screw up on some files and don’t want to restore the whole catalog from backup, reading metadata from individual files is “nice to have”.
HelloI have PS CS5 Extended v.12.1 and i try today to update my Camera Raw from v.6.7 to7.4 but is teinllg me that is now update for me avaible. And also is a little problem on Lightroom v 4.3 i try to use my Nikon D80 in capture mode with him but Lr is not seeing my camera. I can fixed this problem somehow?Best regards.Raul
Camera Raw 6.7 was the last version released for CS5. You’ll need CS6 or CC to run a later Camera Raw version. I’m not certain what you mean by ‘capture mode’ by if you mean tethering, no Lightroom version offers tether support for the D80 I’m afraid.
I’m fairly new to Lightroom, an Aperture convert. Just had the corrupted dialog box after renaming circa 1,500 files. First time I’ve ever seen it.
I quit and reopened Lightroom. Everything was just fine. The renumbering must have aborted midway as not all images reflected the change. Renumbering again and all was well.
I’d certainly recommend quitting and reopening before you do anything.
Good advice Ray! I’m glad to hear everything was ok!
Hi Victoria,
I’m about to go home tonight after work and try this. My catalog somehow became corrupted just a few days ago but thankfully I always backed up after every import or editing. I did not back up my last changes because it wouldn’t let me. (i guess that was a sign my catalog/ or hard drive was about to malfunction) I have a question though. What external hard drive do you recommend? I have used Seagate and LaCie and neither have lasted a year. I have heard of some that do now have a disc that spins, therefore, they have a low likelyhood of becoming damaged. Any suggestions? Thanks!
Hi Raquel. I wish I could give you a definitive answer to that. I’ve always done pretty well with Hitachi and Western Digital, and googling it, that seems to have some scientific basis too: http://lifehacker.com/the-most-and-least-reliable-hard-drive-brands-1505797966
Hi victoria,
thanks I purchased a WD passport 2tb ehd today and created a new catalog within this HD. I followed the steps in this article and restored a back up catalog and did this in the old hd. everything seemed to be working fine and I was able to work on about 100 images and export them to a client before LR crashed again. I went to my new HD and imported some pictures from the old HD and the same thing happened again. I have LR 5.6. I’m not really sure what’s going on. I’m not really sure how to proceed at this point. Could you help me with this?
I’m not sure I’m quite following your steps Raquel… did you create a new catalog or restore a backup? Crashing is usually due to a hardware error. Best bet… post it on http://www.lightroomforums.net where we have a brilliant team who are great at getting to the bottom of issues like this. It’s easier than trying to troubleshoot in blog comments.
I contacted you a couple of weeks ago about having a corrupted Catalog. This occurred with the installation of LR 5.7. I have continued to use that Catalog. And my latest Backups are of that Catalog. When I replace my present Catalog, which I presume is still corrupted, do I need to use a Backup from before I installed LR 5.7?
Thanks.
Hi Jack. Yes, you’d have to roll back to before it was corrupted (but it’s unlikely that the corruption was directly related to the 5.7 upgrade, so you could have to go back quite a lot further). My offer to take a look at the catalog still stands.
Another Help.
Catalogue Settings -> Metadata -> Automatically write changes into XMP
I choose of 1500 of 2000 pictures, and then My computer just froze (backups once a week;)). After importing this folder once again, all the information was there, especially the filter with stars. I was saved 🙂
Of course You must enable this option, before crash… I’ve made it just before browsing these catalog…
Yes, that can help as a belt-and-braces backup. Some people don’t like turning that on because it forces the files to be backed up again (except proprietary raw), and slightly increases the risk of corrupting files (due to hardware errors, not specifically Lightroom). If you have frequent enough catalog backups, it’s not essential, but as you saw in your case, it can save the day on occasion.
If you load files with XMP included does that metadata get automatically restored back into the current (maybe new) catalog ? It seems that it must, but not sure.
And does that XMP include keywords written into those files – and do any new ones then appear as updates or new ones in the keyword list?
Yes and no. XMP doesn’t include everything – it’s missing flags, virtual copies, collection membership, Develop history, stacks, Develop module panel switches and zoomed image pan positions. But yes, it would add any additional keywords as new ones.
Hello Victoria
I back up on a regular basis, and am now getting the message of “unexpected error opening catalog”. I do keep backups, but after the last one I did yesterday, I renumbered some 3600 photos. I can open the backup, BUT it is looking for the photos as they where numbered BEFORE I changed them. I can manually reattach them – but is there a quicker way as that will take forever? Thanks very much in advance…..
Hi 4008. There aren’t many easy solutions to the renaming issue, unless you have an un-renamed set of photos in your backups that you could restore too. Sorry!
There might be one workaround. Tell me the old name and new name of a photo as an example. If it can be recreated from metadata, I may have a solution for you.
This was really helpful! Almost had a heartattack when I first saw the “…cannot be repaired” window without any idea that those weekly automatic backups actually does. Thank you. All Hail!
I’m glad it helped!
Thank you. This really saved me. Wish I’d had a more recent backup than a month ago, but lesson learned.
I’m glad it helped. I’m sure you’ll keep your backups current in future!
The catalog stores all your development settings. If you delete some settings / keywords by mistake and recognize it moths later, you need your catalog backup. I have backups of the last 3 years! (At least one per week). You can use a compression programm to save space (7zip does a good job 1.2GB gets compressed to 40 MB).
Excellent advice THG_BO.
Thank you both. I’m on a Mac so I just clicked on the back-up folder, chose compress and it went from 2.5GB down to 253MB. Now I feel comfortable having multiple back-ups now. But, THG_Bo, if you loose some settings/keywords how do you know which back-up to look in for them? Does one have to go through all of them in sequence till it’s found?
Hopefully you’d notice your lost settings quite quickly, and then just be able to go back to the previous backup. But yes, if you don’t know when you lost them, you may need to work your way back through.
Thank you, Victoria.
My LR backup folder was getting very large so I deleted some older backups. How often do you downsize your backup folder? Does it make sense to have more than the most recent backup? Also if one is using Time Machine does it make sense to also use LR’s backup method? Thanks!
Like THG_BO, I’d suggest keeping older backups, but you can zip them up quite small. Yes, I’d use it in addition to Time Machine. The reason being TM can back up the catalog in an incomplete state, so those backups may not be useable. LR’s backups are done with the catalog closed, so they’re not corrupted, and TM can safely back up those files.
Thank you both. I’m on a Mac so I just clicked on the back-up folder, chose compress and it went from 2.5GB down to 253MB. Now I feel comfortable having multiple back-ups now. But, THG_Bo, if you loose some settings/keywords how do you know which back-up to look in for them? Does one have to go through all of them in sequence till it’s found?