Lightroom catalog not writable ?

I am getting this error message "lightroom cannot use the catlog because it is not writable and cannot be opened." My permissions are set correctly and disc doctor finds no errors. I also have user and admin set correctly.
what else should I check?
I have tried copying the catalog to my desktop, and get the same problem. The catalog currently resides on an external drive that is otherwise fine.

Could it be that your catalogue file is read-only? It shouldn't be.
Hal

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Lightroom catalog not complete

I'm in a bit of a pickle. Yesterday I installed OSXC yosemite on my iMac 2013. Prior to doing this I opened lightroom and backed up my catalog, which is stored along with all my pictures on an external thunderbolt drive.
I installed yosemite clean, meaning I formatted my hard drive. installed lightroom and told it to open my catalog which is on the external.
the problem is when it opened, it was missing about 6 months of work and files?? it was not up to date??
i right click on the folder and tell it to synchronize. so indeed all files are there but the main issue is all those presets, changes i made to each file are gone.
it means I now have to redo all the work on the original files, cropping, exposure and all that.
is there a way to get it all back?
why did it not pickup exactly where it left off - which is what i expected
any help is very much appreciated as I've lost over 6 months of work
again, files all seem to be intact but the actual work done to the image is gone.

When i open lightroom, prior to installing and updating to yosemite, it would open the catalog stored on the external drive.
the date on that file is 10-17-2014, thus current.
my lightroom catalog is stored on the external drive, same place where all my pictures are.
as for backups, they are identical, same issue.
i dont understand why lightroom when opening my catalog on 10-17 was fine but when i update to yosemite and open exact same catalog its missing 6 months of information, despite the fact date on catalog is 10-17 and is same file on same location on an external drive.
i tried a backup file and same thing.

Catalog not writable

I just returned from a six-week trip with lots of photos. Used my laptop with an external HD on which I had the trip catalog and files. When I connect the HD to the Desktop and open the trip catalog, I get the message that the catalog cannot be used because it is not writable and cannot be opened. Maybe because of incorrect pemissions or that catalog is being used by another application. Checked the permissions, seems OK, not being used by another application.
Any suggestions
Puzzled and frustrated.
Stan

Deleted lock file. Did not help.
Thanks for the suggestion. After two long chats with Adobe, now I can open the catalog, and the folder, but it shows the files in grid (even with flag and tags) but no photo. Adobe suggests I create new catalog and copy the folders to the new catalog. Perhaps I should just move the external hd catalog and folders to my desktop. Any suggestions?

List of recent Lightroom Catalogs not showing in the dialog at launch

I have a friend using Lightroom 3 on a Windows 7 PC. She uses multiple catalogs. (one for each client) as do I.
Now when she launches LR the list of recent catalogs is empty. Could this be cleared some where? Why do they not show up and will they start showing up again after she opens different catalogs?
Thanks for any feedback.

If LR uses the Windows recent-files facility, and I’m not saying it does, then clearing recent documents in another area of Windows might have cleared LR’s too. A question back to her would be whether other recent-documents lists have disappeared or only the LR-catalog recent list. The recent-files would be user-profile specific, too, I think, so logging in with a different user would make things look different.
If the LR recent-library-list is something internal to LR and unrelated to the OS, then it could be part of the preferences, and if she reset preferences for any reason, then that might have cleared the catalog list.
If this is on a Mac, then I’m not sure, but I’d expect the OS has a recently-opened-files facility, too, and that such things are tied to the user.
Unless there is some permission problem or corruption that has caused them to disappear, they probably should start showing up, again. It’d be easy enough for her to check, just open LR and open a catalog, then close LR and open LR, again and see if the just-opened catalog shows in the list. If so then there’s probably nothing more to do, except not do whatever cleared the list in the first place, where we can’t really know what she did since we weren’t there.

Why do i get the following message when i attempt to open my backup file for lightroom cc? "Lightroom cannot use the catalog named "Lightroom Catalog" because it is not writable and cannot be opened". This message just started coming up after downloadi

why do i get the following message when i attempt to open my backup file for lightroom cc? "Lightroom cannot use the catalog named "Lightroom Catalog" because it is not writable and cannot be opened". This message just started coming up after downloading lightroom cc (previously using lightroom 5)...am i backing up properly or not???

Open Pictures folder and move the files named lrcat-journal and lrcat.lock to Desktop.
Make sure that , they are not inside Pictures folder any more and try to open backup from Lighrtroom and check..
Any LRcat file with .lock extension , move it to Desktop.

Can't open Lightroom 5.3 catalog. Get ".. it is not writable and cannot be opened" message.

Hi everyone,
I'm having a problem opening a lightroom catalog. I get a message "Lightroom cannot use the catalog because it's not writable and can't be opened".
The catalog and several thousand RAW files are stored on an external drive.
Here are the steps which I believe caused the problem:
1. Worked with the catalog on my PC laptop. Disconnected the drive without closing Lightroom first (big mistake).
2. Plugged the external drive into desktop PC and did additional work. Closed Ligtroom (on desktop) and disconnected the drive.
3. Plugged the drive back into the laptop while original catalog was still open (see #1 above). Clicked on an image at which point Lightroom crashed and closed by itself.
The problem now is that the catalog no longer opens on either computer. Any attempt to open results in "Lightroom cannot use the catalog because it's not writable and can't be opened" message. There are no lock or journal files that can be deleted, just the lrcat file and tons of folders with preview data.
I'm hoping that it's not a lost cause and I can still recover the catalog. There are 2 days worth of work there.
Thank you for any help/advice in advance!

Ok. I found a solution. Since Ligthroom catalog is a SQLite database, you can use a database tool to fix it. Simply download SQLite from www.sqlite.org for your OS (Windows 7 in my case) and unzip to C:\SQLite for ease of use. Copy your corrupt catalog to C:\SQLite folder as well to keep things simple.
Go to command prompt Start>Run, type 'cmd' and click Enter. This will open the command prompt where you will need to execute the following commands:
1. cd sqlite
2. echo .dump | sqlite3 yourcatalogfilename.lrcat > tempcatalog.sql
3. sqlite3 -init tempcatalog.sql newcatalogfilename.lrcat
After executing line 3, you may or may not see error messages. No worries, it simply truncated faulty database records which is what cause the catalog to crash.
Now, copy the newcatalogfilename.lrcat back to your lightroom catalog folder and launch it. You should be able to get things back up and running to where you left of, or to the point where the original Lightroom catalog got corrupted in the first place.
Hope this helps. It took me a few hours to find a solution, but it saved me at least 2 days of work. The original credit goes to the author of the following article http://www.simplyness.com/more-photography-tips/recover-corrupted-unrepairable-lightroom-3 -catalog-with-sqlite.html. It seemed to have worked for Lightroom 3 and still worked for Lightroom 5.3 in my case.

After a power outage, Lightroom won't open. It says the catalog is not writable and will not open

How do I get lightroom to open? It says the catalog is not writable and will not open?

No, Jim. I did not know where the backups were! I've been researching this online, on here, and asking everyone I knew that used lightroom if they had any idea how I could get lightroom to open again. I checked out "permissions" too. Finally, I went to the lightroom folder which was in my PICTURES library and double clicked on "Lightroom 5 Catalog.lrdata" and Lightroom opened up. I hadn't backed up the images since the 24th so all of those that were edited since then went back to being unedited. I had already exported them to another folder so I don't have to do anything to those anyway. Is this lrdata the backup? I had a couple of people tell me to go to Lightroom and do this and do that, but I couldn't open Lightroom up to do anything at all! After getting Lightroom back, I got the 5.5 update and everything seems to be back to normal. I appreciate your help AND your kindness to someone that hasn't got a clue about computers or how this software works.

I'm not able to open a catalog. It says it is not writable and cannot be opened.

This has been happening to me for the past few weeks. If I close my LR5 program and try to re-open the catalog I get a error message that says
Lightroom cannot use the catalog named "Lightroom 5 Catalog 2014" because it is not writable and cannot be opened.
This could be caused by incorrect permissions or because another Lightroom application is using the catalog. You may try to correct the problem or you may select a different catalog.
Then I have the option to choose a different catalog / try again / Exit
I have to go to the backup every time. I am currently working in Windows 8.1
Please help!

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I keep getting the error: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error" when trying to import from a catalog?

I have around 400,000 photos of 15 years so given the high number, I organized all my photos into 6 catalogs to avoid potential problems. All the photos and the catalogs are in a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. I use Adobe Lightroom 5 and I use a PC with the latest Windows Office 2013.
I wanted to have a NEW Catalog of all my rated 1 Star+ photos of all the years in a single Catalog. So I created what I called Star+ Catalog and I was told the best option is to import a Catalog at a time and given that there is no means to filter importing only Stared photos, I would import all the photos and then delete all the UnStared photos. I did that for Catalog Year 2014 but at the end gave me the message: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error". It actually had imported around 40k photos from about 50k total. I tried again and again and every time I end up with the same thing. I created another new Catalog and stared from scratch and the same ting happened: the ONLY EXACT 40k or so photos were imported and the rest were not!! When I imported Catalog Year 2013 of around 45k photos, it worked perfectly. But when I imported Catalog Year 2012 of 35k photos, the same thing happened!!
I then tried exporting the needed photos to a new Catalog and that worked. But then when I try to import them again from my Master *+ Catalog I get the same error again!!
I also tried creating a new Master *+ Catalog and tried to import the Catalogs of each year into it and the same error happened again!!!
Any advice: 1) on how to solve this? and 2) if there is a better and easier way to create this Master Catalog of All Stared Photos of All my Catalogs?

This is a duplicate thread - see here

How to solve the error: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error" when trying to "import from catalog"?

I have around 400,000 photos of 15 years so given the high number, I organized all my photos into 6 catalogs to avoid potential problems. All the photos and the catalogs are in a 4TB Seagate external hard drive. I use Adobe Lightroom 5 and I use a PC with the latest Windows Office 2013.
I wanted to have a NEW Catalog of all my rated 1 Star+ photos of all the years in a single Catalog. So I created what I called Star+ Catalog and I was told the best option is to import a Catalog at a time and given that there is no means to filter importing only Stared photos, I would import all the photos and then delete all the UnStared photos. I did that for Catalog Year 2014 but at the end gave me the message: "lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error". It actually had imported around 40k photos from about 50k total. I tried again and again and every time I end up with the same thing. I created another new Catalog and stared from scratch and the same ting happened: the ONLY EXACT 40k or so photos were imported and the rest were not!! When I imported Catalog Year 2013 of around 45k photos, it worked perfectly. But when I imported Catalog Year 2012 of 35k photos, the same thing happened!!
Any advice: 1) on how to solve this? and 2) if there is a better and easier way to create this Master Catalog of All Stared Photos of All my Catalogs?

OK, my starting point is that LR can happily contain 400000+ photos, and it's a mistake to create a 1 star plus catalogue as you suggest. Instead, I'd recommend you create a master catalogue of all your photos, which you can then query however you want - 2 star, or a certain keyword, or with "xyz" in the title etc.
If you are intent on going that way, you could try a slight change from what you've done so far. Instead of trying to import an entire catalogue and then delete no-star pictures, take the 2014 and 2012 catalogues and select only the 1 star photos. Then do an Export as Catalog for these items, and import the 2014-1star and 2012-1star into your new catalogue. That may get you past the problem images which I suspect are the problem.
If that doesn't work, or if you follow my initial advice, you're going to need to identify the image where the failure occurs. You may have a corrupt image file, and replacing it from your backup may be sufficient to resolve the problem. Alternatively, it may be a corrupt record in the catalogue, and in this case it may be sufficient to remove the image from the catalogue and import it again. You might try selecting everything in the 2014 catalogue and seeing if you can do an Export as Catalog, creating a clean 2014, and deleting 2014's previews folder might also get rid of a potential problem. Something else is to try the Export as Catalog for images 1-40000, then a second Export as Catalog for images 40002-50k.
So a few things you'll need to try, rather than a magic bullet, and a recommendation to change the underlying direction.
John

"Lightroom catalog was not found" error... help pls!

Hi All-
I have a new PC and moved all my Lightroom folders over from my dead laptop.
Whenever I open LR, I get a message saying "lightroom catalog was not found," and am given options to locate an existing catalog or load the default catalog. When I load the default catalog, everything is fine -- all my photos are there, all my adjustments are intact, etc.
Then I quit LR, reopen, and get the same tiresome message.
How do I keep this from happening? I'm concerned that some setting is pointing to the wrong location, and I fear the consequences...
Thanks!
-Gian

OK, I must be doing something wrong, because everything I'm trying fails.
Here's the blow-by-blow:
Launch LR4
Error Box: The catalog at location (C:.....) [catalog address on old machine] could not be found. Would you like to open an existing catalog or use the default one?
Select: Use Default Catalog
LR4 Launches, everything is fine
Catalog Settings --> General says I am using a catalog at c:\Users\Gian\Pictures\Lightroom named Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat
Preferences --> General --> "When starting up, use this catalog:" --> Load Most Recent Catalog
Quit Lightroom
Re-Launch LR4
Same error message, referencing location of catalog on old PC
Select: Choose a Different Catalog
Highlight Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat in c:\Users\Gian\Pictures\Lightroom. Tick box at bottom of screen: Always load this catalog on startup.
Click "Open"
LR opens, everything works fine
Catalog Settings --> General says I am using a catalog at c:\Users\Gian\Pictures\Lightroom named Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat
Quit Lightroom
Re-Launch Lightoom
Error Box: The catalog at location (C:.....) [catalog address on old machine] could not be found. Would you like to open an existing catalog or use the default one?
Use Default Catalog this time...
LR opens, everything works fine
Catalog Settings --> General says I am using a catalog at c:\Users\Gian\Pictures\Lightroom named Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat
Now I try changing Preferences --> General --> Default Catalog --> "When starting up, use this catalog:" --> Load Most Recent Catalog, specifing c:\Users\Gian\Pictures\Lightroom\Lightroom 4 Catalog.lrcat
Hit OK
Quit LR
Relaunch LR
Error Box: The catalog at location (C:.....) [catalog address on old machine] could not be found. Would you like to open an existing catalog or use the default one?
What am I missing?
Argh...
-Gian

Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error.

OS 10.5.8
(gb mem
I have recently exported a catalog from my main database (on a mac) with about 700 photos. Including negative files
We opened the catalog on a PC machine in the same version of lightroom. 3.5 camera raw 6.5. The images were given new keywords and then exported as a Catalog including Negative files.
The original catalog has been deleted from the main database on the Mac.
The Catalog with the new keywords saved across the network to the Mac.
Permissions are open to everyone on the folder the Catalog is in.
When I try and import the catalog in lightroom I can see the thumbnails,
However get this message. I’ve lost many hours trying to get the catalog bak into the main library.
I can open the catalog on its own in Lightroom, just when I try and import the catalog I get the bellow message.
I’ve tried importing saving to a new location
Importing not moving the files
Lightroom could not import this catalog because of an unknown error.
I see others have had similar problems however do not see a clear answer.
Has anybody a solution?
Thanks Patrick

I'm having this issue as well, and honestly I've *never* been able to get "import from catalog" to work. In my case I have a catalog created on my Windows 7 laptop in LR3.5. I've copied it to an external drive, plugged it into my PC running Windows 7 with LR3.5. And I get the "could not import this catalog because of an unknown error" message.
I've confirmed every image in the catalog I am trying to import is accounted for and isn't "missing". There are no duplicate images between the exported catalog and the one I'm trying to import in.
Thoughts?
Neil

Upgrading from Lightroom 1 to 4.1 - catalog not recognized

I am trying to upgrade gtom LR 1.0 version to 4.1 version and my catlog is not being recognized for upgrade. I launch LR, select my NAME.IRCAT catlog and get this message: " The Ligghtroom catalog named "Lightroom Catalog" cannot be opneded because it is not valid. Would you like to select a different catalog?"
I wonder if need to upgrade to some lower version befor moving to 4.1. I have not upgraded in many years, actually I never upgraded since I first purchased LR. I finally purchased a new PC and upgraded my OS, and consequently decided to upgrade all my most important SW.
Thanks to anyone who has insight to help me with my issue.

It might be worth trying to upgrade from 1.0 to 1.4.1 first, and THEN try the upgrade to LR4. You can download it from here:
http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/thankyou.jsp?ftpID=3892&fileID=3652

'Not enough room' - Cannot open Lightroom catalog

I cannot open Lightroom catalog bc there is 'not enough room on the hard drive named ...' I keep erasing more and more on this hard drive and still it does not work and keeps saying the same thing. Please help!

It says 'before continuing, please make at least 20 MB available on this hard drive'. I have deleted much more than 20 MB and still nothing helps.
Under system info it says:
Lightroom version: 3.2 [692106]
Version: 10.6 [8]
Application architecture: x64
Physical processor count: 4
Processor speed: 3.0 GHz
Built-in memory: 4096.0 MB
Real memory available to Lightroom: 4096.0 MB
Real memory used by Lightroom: 185.3 MB (4.5%)
Virtual memory used by Lightroom: 2402.8 MB
Memory cache size: 0.0 MB
Displays: 1) 1920x1080
Serial Number: [removed]
Application folder: /Applications
Library Path: /Users/susanehong/Pictures/Lightroom/Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat
Settings Folder: /Users/susanehong/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom
Also, please note that I am able to open Lightroom under a different catalog and the photos appear but they cannot be imported bc they 'cannot be read'.
Please help!

I see the message below but I can not find the other aplication : The Lightroom catalog named "lightroom Catolog" cannot be opened becouse another aplication has it opened.

I see the message below but I can not find the other aplication : The Lightroom catalog named "lightroom Catolog" cannot be opened becouse another aplication has it opened.

Have a look at this thread.
Trouble opening Lightroom 5

Lightroom catalog not writable ?

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