A Lightroom Catalogue Disaster

[johnbuckley]

I've used Lightroom since March 2007. I have an iMac with OSX Snow Leopard. I've never had a problem with the catalogue backup process. Today, I was uploading some M9 shots when the system froze (spinning beach ball), and I had to Force Quit Lightroom. Midway through a second try, same thing happened. When I fired Lightroom up again, I was told the catalogue was corrupted, and was urged to update the backup catalogue. Okay, I did that. But when I fired it up... what had been a library of 6000 photos was now a library of 3900. Fortunately, I had most of the rest on SD cards... But still, where are my photos?

Any help someone can offer on how to retrieve the missing photographs would be greatly appreciated. JB

[archi4]

John,
Are the photo files really gone, or is only the catalog - which I see as a sort of pointer - messed up.
If the files are still on your disk or on a backup disk, then you can always import them into the catalog, or create a new catalog.
All my images are backed up to a separate external hard disk, and I can always create a new catalog.
To delete the photo files from disk means going through warnings and deliberately deleting from disk and not just from the catalog. If LR deleted and/or corrupted your files by itself, please let me know and I will stop using LR immediately!!
Maurice

[haroldp]

I would start with a generic ('this mac') 'finder' search on jpg and / or whatever your raw file suffix is (eg: for Nikon it would be 'nef' for Leica it would be 'dng'.

If that finds nothing, try disk recovery software such as rescue pro, which will look for file and bit string signatures rather than directory entries.

Outside lightroom scheduled backups are a good idea to begin after you recover, but would not help you now.

Regards ... Harold

[stunsworth]

You should also be able to find and reinstate a previous Lightroom backup. Look for files with a .lrcat suffix. Each backup is in it's own folder - the folder names are in the format CCYY-MM-DD HHMM format.

[johnbuckley]

Thank you all for the advice. Was able to reload a catalogue that was roughly one month old, which means I only had to reimport a few hundred photos. Very helpful to have this advice, and I appreciate it.

[MikeMyers]

Being relatively new to Lightroom, and not having a book to instruct me, I learned how to do things by watching the Adobe "TV" videos on how to do stuff. Their recommended procedure is as follows:

a) put ALL your photos under a single directory. (I did this, and just called it "pictures", which I created inside the Vista directory with the same name.)

b) don't import your photos into Lightroom - when you import photos, use the selection to leave the images where they are.

c) Make sure you back up the directory that contains all your photos. That way you've got a full backup of your photos as of that date.

d) Back up your catalog.


As I understand it, no matter what you click on in Lightroom, your original images will be left untouched unless you confirm a "move" or "delete". That's to prevent something unwanted to happen, from accidentally hitting a key you didn't intend to hit. I wish Windows had the same warning!!!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Having said all that, I did have a problem several days ago. I was deleting images I didn't like, and I suspect I clicked on the wrong thing, as suddenly my Lightroom folder was missing a lot of images. I found them in the Recycle Bin. I don't know what I did wrong, but I've since decided that I will do a backup before I start deleting anything.

I had another problem last night. I learned how to move folders around, and was doing that when suddenly a lot of images seemed to be missing. The computer had "locked up" (the Lightroom window went to that light gray color you see in Windows when a program is no longer responding) and when I got Lightroom running again, I was unable to move any folders. When I tried, I got an error message. Then the middle window "froze" in the multiple-image display. I shut down Lightroom and restarted it, and now everything seems OK. I don't know if the glitch was from Lightroom or my laptop, but I decided that I won't do this kind of thing in the future unless I do a backup first.

[wda]

John, LR cannot lose your pictures unless you instruct to DELETE them from your DISK. I make a practice of backing up my hard-drives every day or so; never less three days apart. That cuts down the restoration work if a catalogue does become corrupt. I thought there was a way to repair catalogues, but maybe I am thinking of IView MediaPro which I used before LR arrived.

[jpattison]

John,
I was wondering if you used TimeMachine to find your catalogue from a month earlier? If so, weren't there more recent versions?, and by the way, how did you re-instate it?

Cheers,
John

[farnz]

John,

To reinstate from an earlier catalog or to launch LR from any catalog of your choice press the Ctrl key (Command key for Macs) while you launch LR and a dialogue box will appear asking you to specify the catalog you want it to open. Navigate to that catalog and prepare for the crazy LR journey to Nirvana.

Pete,

[viramati]

if you use time machine you could restore that.

[ericperlberg]

Sorry I didn't notice this sooner. There is a chap named Dan Tull who works with the Lightroom team at Adobe who can almost always apparently fix a catalogue that has become corrupt. Apparently there are certain instances where a lightroom is running and a crash happens that the catalogue gets corrupted. Anyway, happened to me. I read a bunch of similar posts on Adobe's Lightroom forum and always they said to contact this gentleman named Dan Tull and they gave his email. I wrote to him a nice email apologetically asking for help and saying what happened and he asked me to post him the catalogue that was corrupt. I did. About an hour later he sent me my catalogue back and it was fully restored.

You can reach him at dantull at gmail dot com. If you google Dan Tull Adobe you'll see lots of links. You can read him on Twitter at Dan Tull (dantull) on Twitter

[AbbeyPhoto]

Apart from all the good advice about backing up, it is also worth switching on the option to write all information to XMP files (by default this is off). In the event that a catalogue is lost, having the XMP files allows Lightroom to read most (but not all) of the adjustments you have made. Without this you will have to re-edit all the files you re-import into the catalogue. Theoretically there is a performance hit with this, but I haven't noticed it to be a problem on either my old Mac Pro or my Macbook.

There's loads of good info in Victoria Bampton's book 'Lightroom - the missing FAQ', everyone should have a copy of this.

[WPalank]

JB,
A timely post and I'm glad things worked out for you. Kelby Training just introduced a course this week "Backing Up Lightroom and Your Photos" by Matt Kloskowski.
Online Training | Kelby Training
Go to Browse > Browse by > Category > Lightroom > Backing up Lightroom...
and at least the introduction is free. Then if it looks good, you can buy a month for about $19 to see the whole course.

[johnbuckley]

William, and all, thank you so much.

I had my images backed up, so lost no DNG files. What I did lose, as it turned out, were the "processed" files which were catalogued in Lightroom. Those had to be white balanced, etc. all over again.

The biggest lesson I've learned through this is that one should not be impatient when importing images. As I piece it together what happened -- I think -- was this:

I have Lightroom set so that the card ejects when the last photo is imported. But I had the "spinning beachball" on my Mac screen spinning, and spinning. I went to Force Quit to see if there was a problem, and it said that Lightroom was not responding. So I quite Lightroom, assuming all would be well. But that action corrupted my backup catalogue. All the images were on my computer -- and in the SD cards, as they are now inexpensive enough that I keep them. The only images not found when I went to a backup catalogue were the ones I'd most recently imported (M9 shots mostly) which I still had. Still, a big pain.

Thanks for your help! JB

[farnz]

William,

I apologise for correcting your spelling but for anyone looking for the course it might be quite important; I believe it's "Kozlowski"

Pete.

[WPalank]

Originally Posted by farnz

William,

I apologise for correcting your spelling but for anyone looking for the course it might be quite important; I believe it's "Kozlowski"

Pete.

Actually Pete,
Surprisingly, I spelled it correctly. Your spelling looks more believable though.
Same guy that does this website:
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips

[farnz]

William,

My abject apologies, you're quite right - I lazily checked the spelling with Google <duh!> and never thought to check it on a Matt Kloskowski book that I own. (Stoopid, stoopid, stoopid!)

Humbled,
Pete.

[WPalank]

No worries Pete, I understood your context. Newer members would be unfamiliar with the name.