Can't find my Lightroom Catalogs

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
May 6, 2020
3 replies
820 views

I had to do a Clean reinstall of my MacOS High Sierra. Reinstalled Lightroom Classic from my Adobe account but now it can't locate/open my various Catalogues from the PICTURES Folder...beacuse they're not there. I have a Time Machine drive set up but the Folders inside my Macintosh HD's/Desktop/Pictures folder is now empty. What can I do to recover them?

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JP Hess

Inspiring

Do you use the catalog backup feature provided in Lightroom itself?

JP Hess

Inspiring

The catalogs are normally located in a Lightroom folder within the Pictures folder. If Time Machine didn't back that folder up then it's possible you don't have them. However, did you have a different backup folder configured, and were you creating regular backups to that location?

nicolinogiangiordano64Author

Known Participant

Thanks for your reply.

I have an external HD that I use as my Time Machine drive. It always backs up absolutely everything.

After a clean re-install of my MacOS that I had to perform earlier today, the Time Machine backups show a red circular ‘no entry’ sign at the corner of all the Folders in Users/(machine name)/… including /Pictures where all the Lightroom Catalogs were stored.

Only the backup labelled ‘Latest’ has folders that will allow me to open but inside that Pictures/Lightroom Folder is a brand new and unused Lightroom Catalog.lrcat and no other.

Any assistance would be great.

.

Theresa J

Community Expert

It sounds like you created a new user with a new login when you did the clean instal. I think you can get access to the older backups from time machine if you remember your old user login. I'm not exactly sure how, but that is the key to finding your old catalog.

DdeGannes

Community Expert

The most important thing is imho is the original photo files, have they been lost and you have no backup? The Catalog file does not contain any photo files or copies of them, it is a data based file it only contains data.

Is there a sub-folder in your Pictures folder called "Lightroom".

Regards, Denis: iMac 27” mid-2015, macOS 11.7.10 Big Sur; 2TB SSD, 24 GB Ram, GPU 2 GB; LrC 12.5,; Lr 6.5, PS 24.7,; ACR 15.5,; (also Laptop Win 11, ver 24H2, LrC 15.3; PS 27.0; ) Camera Oly OM-D E-M1.

nicolinogiangiordano64Author

Known Participant

No. I have all my original RAW photo files…thankfully.

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