Help -- Lightroom 4.2 Destroyed My Catalog and It's Backup!

I performed a backup of my Lightoom 4.2 catalog upon exiting an editing session. No errors were reported. The next time I opened Lightroom it said the catalog was invalid. Upon checking I found both the catalog and it's backup totally empty -- 0 bytes. It must have erased the catalog during the integrity checking/optimization process prior to doing the backup. Is there any way to recover this catalog? If not, I will have lost a lot of work since the previous backup a week earlier. Obviously the catalog was fine just prior to the backup process as I had just been successfully using it. How could something so catastrophic have happened?? Any and all help will be appreciated!

Hi dj_paige. Yes, I see 5 catalogs under File->Open recent, all old catalogs. I do not see my current catalog, probably because it is no longer a valid catalog. On my hard drive I see all 5 of the old catalogs plus my current one. But the current one now has a file size of 0 bytes whereas prior to the backup it was about 1.1 GB. I spoke to a supervisor at Adobe support and insisted they report this problem to the Adobe engineers as a bug. I did not, however, get a feeling of any confidence that they would do so -- he said all problems are reported. So I made an entry under "Report a bug" on the Adobe website for whatever that's worth. I guess the moral of this story is that one should do a backup after every editing session to minimize the amount of work lost. Thanks for your interest and help!

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Catalog and Keyword Non-Image files

In addition to my images, I have a growing collection of background and reference information relating to the subject or location of the images.
I would like Lightroom to be able to Catalog and apply keywords to non-image files.
I use a metadata search to find my images; I want to be able to use the same tool (Lightroom) and the same metadata (keywords) to find other related information.
If Lightroom could Catalog and Keyword all Adobe format files (PDF, InDesign, etc.) this would be a great start.
The next step; selectable list of file-types; export keywords to .xmp

Joe,
Being a digital archivist dealing primarily with pages digitized from the turn of the 20th Century for a religious sect I am highly involved in the usage of keywords. Each page of a work, be it either a volume of a newspaper or a book, contains keywords. I do not use side-car files but instead incorporate my keywords directly into the resultant TIF file.
So I used your posting to see what the answer was. To that end I am presently working on a 1922 title, Thirty-One Years of Organized Work in Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico and Louisiana by Church of the Brethren from 1891 to 1922, that will consist of slightly over 500 pages. To test your question I placed the title of the work as a keyword. I then used Bridge's find ability. It did not work.
I forgot that Bridge converts all commas into semi-colons. And changing the colons into semi-colons still returned no results. An examination of the keywords tab showed the string broken down in to sections. Searching for the longest string showed the problem. Returning to my keyowrd string I removed all instances of the semi-colons and re-searched. This resulted in a properyl found file.
So. The longest string I have tested to date is 120 characters, the title of the work minus the commas. I suspect that Curt is correct in his assumption that it is limited by the operation system. I tested this theory by incorporating a double string (without the commas) of my book's title. This was 241 characters including the space between the duplicated title. The search was successful. A triple set of the title returned no hits.
Wayne Webb

I have used lightroom for ~2 years and have lightroom 5.5 installed on a PC. Yesterday evening I uploaded a new set of photos which I cataloged and rated as usual. After that when I switched to the develop module trouble began. First thing was when using

I have used lightroom for ~2 years and have lightroom 5.5 installed on a PC. Yesterday evening I uploaded a new set of photos which I cataloged and rated as usual. After that when I switched to the develop module trouble began. First thing was when using the crop tool the picture would disappear and only reappear once I closed the tool. Then exposure and White balance changes would change the histogram but not the appearance of the photo. Finally clipping was also not appearing on the picture. I first reuploaded the photos. No effect. Then I reinstalled lightroom. No effect. Help please!

Try deleting your preferences file
How do I delete the Lightroom Preferences file? - The Lightroom Queen Help Desk & Members Area - Powered by Kayako Resol…

Upgrading to Yosemite wiped out my Lightroom 5.6 catalog and presets.

My stand alone Lightroom 5.6 is gone. Even the LR presets that came with Lightroom 5 are missing.
I have tried for hours to reload all the presets, plugins and link the images (stored always on external HD)
Things look right after backing up however, restarting the computer everything is lost again.
Going back to find the back up? It is empty. To open Lightroom 5.6 empty again. It doesn't give me the option to choose a catalog.
I can however, open a recent catalog. It opens up without any presets or images. Either way I have to manually link everything all over again.
The Adobe forums were not as helpful as I had hoped.
My apologies if this doesn't make sense.

In LR6, select File->Open Catalog and point to your LR5 catalog

Lightroom 2 Catalogs and Folders

Hello,
I am new to lightroom 2 and digital photography in general. I am having a hard time understanding how to organize my files and how to use catalogs. I have been taking an online class through Lynda.com, and have watched this section several times and am still stuck. I really do not want to go much further until I understand catalogs and develop a logical organizational flow. I am using a Mac. Any help?
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Hi All:
based on the good work of Dorin above (post #19), he did a timeline of various releases of Lightroom from Adobe and it shows that from "version x RC" to "final release version" was around 1 month.
as it is already exactly one month now, it must not be too much longer till they will release the LR2.3 Final Version.
As for what Robert said in post #23, well, there's never any "guarantee" on a problem-free piece of software, or, for that matter, anything one purchases or anything in life, actually!! Yet, one can make educated extrapolations, right? From the range of comments thus far on LR2.3RC, it appears that it is the best version yet of LR2.x. This leads to the conclusion that it is probably a "good bet" that this version will likely lead to the least amount of issues, right? Maybe not "zero issues", but most likely, the least amount of issues from the various LR2.x versions available.
So by waiting, say, merely 1-3 more weeks approximately, i can go directly from LR1.4 (which i've been using for many months) to LR2.3 Final Release Version. It seems like it is a prudent and conservative move or plan.
What do the good folks here think, please?
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Lightroom Catalog and Apple Open Directory Users

We are attempting to run Lightroom in our photo journalism classes and we are unable to setup the application because it will not create the Catalog file.
All of the users in Open Directory have their OSX 10.8 home folder stored on our Apple Server. This enabled them to log into any one of the computers in the lab and have access to their data/documents.
Lightroom refuses to create the Catalog file because it treats the home folder as a network folder.
My predecessor found some way around this in the past but he didn't document it and I can't find any evidence of it either.
Can anyone help me out here? Surely there are other people out there trying to use Adobe Products who also utilize Apple's "Open Directory" (its like apple's version of Active Directory).
The only help online I've found was to try and create symbolic links but even after making symbolic links from the local HD to the Network user Home folder lightroom still refused to create the catalog file.

its been almost a year and we still don't have any good answers to this issue.
Lightroom is not usable for any domain/directory enabled accounts because their home directories are stored on the network.
Is there anything else we can do? We do not want them to "share" their catalogs but we really need them to be able to store their catalog on their network home because they do not always use the same computer and policy disallows saving documents or files to the local hard drives for students.

Lightroom 4.4 keeps crashing saying "Lightroom encountered an error when reading from its preview cache and needs to quit" please help. I've tried reinstalling it and everything Windows 8.1

Lightroom 4.4 keeps crashing saying "Lightroom encountered an error when reading from its preview cache and needs to quit" please help. I've tried reinstalling it and everything Windows 8.1

I assume you know where your catalogue file (the lrcat file) is located. In the same folder is a previews lrdata folder which you should delete or rename in Explorer, then start LR again.
If I've made incorrect assumptions above, sorry, and we'll go back over it from the start.
John

Is there a way I can edit pictures in Lightroom 5 on my mac and be able to switch to my pc if I have my catalog and my pictures on an external hard drive?

Hi,
I have a MacBook Pro and I also have a Wacom Cintiq companion and I would like to be able to edit my pictures on both the computers. I prefer using my mac but sometimes, when I need to be more precise with my editing, I like to use my Wacom Cintiq companion. I followed the steps to install my catalog and pictures on an external hard drive, then added the ''Folder'' of pictures in both computers but the problem I have is that since a PC and a Mac doesn't read the hard drive ''root'' the same way, it creates a second folder on my mac that I can't have access and I am not able to edit pictures on one computer and keep them on the other computer.
Can someone help me??
Here is an exemple of what I get ...

Contact the Apple account security team for your country and request assistance: Apple ID: Contacting Apple for help with Apple ID account security. If you can prove your identity to them, they can reset the password and help you regain control of the account.

Moved catalog and now LR won't open it by default. Help?

I'm running LR2 (I know, first step, UPGRADE!), but in the meantime, I had to move my catalog because my drive got full. Under the Backup dialog box I chose the new location. But when I just click on the LR icon to open the program it opens with the default C: drive catalog location that it first installed with. Then I open the specific catalog from in the program and relaunch it. I have LR set to bring the dialog box everytime I start LR since I don't use it everyday. So I back it up when the dialog comes up and when it's done it goes right back to the default catalog with none of my library in there. Why do I have to keep opening the catalog manually?? It's driving me insane at this point. Can someone provide some tips please?? Thanks.

Double-click the moved catalog and Lr will open with it.
But in fact, you did not move the catalog at all. you made a backup of your catalog, and that is what you should do.
But making a backup catalog does not mean that Lr now opens with the backup catalog.
Having a backup means that there are now 2 catalogs: the "working" catalog and the backup catalog. If you had only one (1) catalog, you wouldn't have a backup.
Lr still opens and works with your "working" catalog. That is normal and expected.
If you want to move your "working" catalog do this:
Close Lr. In your OS (Mac Finder / Win Explorer) move (not copy!) the catalog to a different location. Then double-click the moved catalog and Lr will open with it and will use the new location as "working" catalog. But I recommend that you do not put your "working" catalog on the same drive as the "backup" catalog. If that drive fails, you have neither a "working" nor a "backup" catalog. Not good!
But I wonder why you would say your drive got full. Usually the catalog doesn't fill a drive, but your photos are.
Moving the catalog doesn't move your photos.
What you don't know, maybe, is that the catalog and the photos don't have to be on the same drive. So you can leave your catalog on the C-drive and have your photos somewhere else.
If you want to move your photos, you best do this in Lr. If you do it in your OS, you will have to re-link the photos and image folders.
See here on how to do the re-linking:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/creative-suite-podcast-photographers/lightroom-dude-where-are-my -photos/
http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

Lightroom cc does not start. logout and login in creative cloud does not help. Have a test account, 2 days more to go (and want to decide whether to buy PS & LR CC or to stay with current desktop solutions.)

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Thanks for your reply. I was able to find help through a tech support chat session and the person helped me edit my /etc/hosts file and it solved the problem.
For anyone else experiencing this issue (Mac OS X):
Close all other programs and sign out from the Adobe Desktop App
From the Finder, Go > Go to Folder...
Type /etc and hit enter
Find "hosts" file (only "hosts", there were similar files such as hosts.config but only open the one that says "hosts"
Open the file, and replace the entire content with ### Host Database## localhost is used to configure the loopback interface#
Close the file, sign back into the Adobe Desktop App
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Sharing a lightroom catalog - Does housing the catalog and images on an external hard drive work?

I will be managing a small portion of a client's overall image workflow by updating their web prescence on a regular basis with new work and retagging/uploading old work. I believe this requires the catalog and the image library to be housed on an external hard drive that can travel between the two of us. We are both working on PC's with LR 5.3.
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Client downloads new images onto external hard drive and imports into LR
"ClientCatalog" is created
Flags Picks and Creates a Collection from those Picks
Hard drive is handed off to me where I open "ClientCatalog"
Make suggested edits to images
add detailed tags and metadata
upload to various social media sites and websites
return hard drive to client
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Photwell wrote:
I ran into this problem with my own catalog a few weeks ago. I plugged my external hard drive into a different USB and everything was gone.
Not gone, just mis-addressed. It can be re-addressed as necessary. I believe it is enough on MacOs, to name the drive. On Windows, the details vary by OS version (Google for instructions) but this is for Win7:
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/change-drive-letters-windows-7.htm
and it is a good idea to assign a drive letter quite a bit later in the alphabet, to restrict the chance of ever finding that letter already taken. For example, it could be X: for external drive, or P: for plug-in drive, or whatever makes sense to you...
After doing this, on re-starting Lightroom and opening the Catalog, the images will at first go offline (previously used location not found). To get them back online, it will be necessary to re-browse the parent folder for all your image folders, to reflect its new location under the new drive reference. That done, the Catalog location info for all the images and subfolders located under that parent folder, will be updated automatically. If this parent is not currently showing in the LR Folders list, you can right-click and choose "Show Parent". LR's display then reorganises to reflect this actual hierarchy.
regards, RP

I'm trying to download Lightroom 5 onto my 2nd computer, and I'm getting a message that my license number is invalid, please help!

I'm trying to download Lightroom 5 onto my 2nd computer, and I'm getting a message that my license number is invalid, please help!

Keith_Reeder wrote:
Well - as long as he/she has registered it - it's not really going to hurt to do so.
I wouldn't post mine up though...
But in LR registration with Adobe is is not automatic as was the case for PS. It is an optional action that must be initiated by the user. He may not have done so.
now i downloaded the trial version of lightroom in the new computer
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There's a whole lot to read in your post, and frankly I have not read it all.
Having said that, this troubleshooting guide should help:
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1538
In particular, pay attention to the mobile device support sections near the bottom, assuming you have already done the items above it.

My lightroom 4 wouldn't open. A computer tech worked on my computer to clean it all up, etc. however lightroom still wouldn't open. He opened a new catalog and that will work, however I can't find my old one with all my photographs. When I click on ope

My Lightroom 4 wouldn't open. A computer tech worked on my computer to clean it all up, etc. however Lightroom still wouldn't open. He opened a new catalog and that will work, however I can't find my old one with all my photographs. When I click on open catalogs, it goes to documents and I can't find any catalogs there.

What happens if you try File->Open Recent? What happens if you have your operating system search all of your hard disks for files whose name ends with .LRCAT?

Help -- Lightroom 4.2 Destroyed My Catalog and It's Backup!

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