Inspiring

Question

corrupt catolog

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
August 24, 2020
4 replies
1074 views

I have accidentally corrupted my huge catalog with changes to one photo file. I did not know that I should have removed it from lightroom before deleting duplicates. It is only a tiny part of the overall catalog. I need to repair it but do not know how to do this. Can you give me advice.All I see is that the file is corrupted and I think the drive has been made read only by Lightroom

Thanks

Crash or freeze

This topic has been closed for replies.

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

To add mor information here is a screen shot of the steps that lightroom was making as it rebuilt my catalog. It is obviously a complex process and I am very hestitant to emulate this sorcerers apprentice

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

I had just said in a reply that there must be something wrong with the photo file. So I went back into the folder that I had been working on, and now find that there are some photos with an intact thumnail ( In Windows 10) but I could not open them. The files have properties such as size and security information etc but I cannot open them. I could not find any indication that was not allowed to access them. Maybe this is a source of the problem I don't think they were like that previously.

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

I have follow up information that might be important. I wondered whether the problem might be resolved if I restarted my computer. I therefore tried to restart it in the prescribed way. The result was a blank screen with the circling boot up loop running for 1 hour.I therefor stopped the boot process removed the external hard drive which contained the photo files and rebooted.The machine went through the start up process to give me my logrompt in within 4 minutes with the usual picture. However logging in was not successful as the machine sat their for 30 minutes.

As it seemed that the operating system was running smoothly I tried the Control/Alt Delete commandwhich worked and I tried to switch users. This gave me the login option again and I was able to instantly get into my files.

I will explore the external hard drive and Light Room perhaps I will be able to rebuild my files again.

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

Hi I clicked on your name and came to this place. I will try to load a screen shot here.

I cannot load this catalog nor the back up I have made. This next screen shot shows the folders created by light room which had previously repaired the catalog after a similar crash

There you can see the the folder for corrupt catalogs which is where I got my terminology. Lightroom did the same thing a week ago but ended up with a lock file which went away and then lightroom rebuilt itself as you see. When it was restored and running I made a copy of it before trying again to sort out the problem with that one file.

cmgap

Community Expert

Did you make any of these folders? Try dragging the previews.lrdata file out of that directory and put it in the same directory as the .lrcat file.

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

No they were made by light room when it was rebuilding my catalog on a
previous crash when I was working on the same file. At the end the
catalog was running just fine. So I made a back up and then foolishly
repeated what I had done before trying to clean up the specific folder
and crashed lightroom and was again unable to restart that catalog nor
the backup catalog which had been running a few minutes earlier. There
is much more detail in the rebuilding process which is noted in a folder
logging intermediate steps.

I think that if I could get lightroom to repeat what it was doing in
those steps that it would be up an running again, but I don't know how
to trigger that. I am therefore a bit hesitant to do anything that
might disturb that sequence.

cmgap

Community Expert

Hello sockit... have you been making backups of your catalog when you quit Lightroom? If you have a recent backup it may be that using the backup will get you on track quicker than trying to repair the corrupt catalog. That said I have repaired corrupted catalogs before by following the prompts with success.

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

Hi Yes I have a back up.

I have just replied to an earlier message which may not have been
entered into the community forum. I am new to the forum and do not
know if these messages

are getting through. I will try to load the back up and will report back

Thanks

dj_paige

Legend

To tell you the truth, your explanation doesn't really make a lot of sense. Changes to a photo file do not corrupt a catalog. Lightroom Classic cannot make a drive read only.

Why do you think the catalog is corrupted? What do you see? Please show us a screen capture of the actual problem.

S

sockitAuthor

Inspiring

Hi I tried to reply but as I added screen shots I had to log into the
forum and the reply was rejected. I have been looking for the forum and
don't know how to log back into it. Could you give me directions please.

I was trying to send you images of the failure to open the catalog and
another image which shows the files including a Corrupt Catalog folder
which lists the folder

I have my photos all 640 Kbytes of them on an external 5 terabyte drive.
There is nothing else on the drive. I checked and neither the drive nor
my photos folder are read only.

The problem I have came from the fact that I have tried to put big
files with duplicate images on lightroom and overwhelmed its ability to
not load duplicates. I had hoped that it would handle them. This was
then crashing lightroom. I therefore tried to sort them out but caused
the problem. I now realise that I should have removed them from light
room before working on them but did it in my ignorance. I was working on
just one file in lightroom and hoped that it would be able to restore
the catalog, but I cannot seem to get it to do that.

Thanks

S

dj_paige

Legend

Hello sockit, I still am very skeptical as your description of what happened sounds very implausible.

It seems as if you think the catalog is corrupted because you see something that doesn't look right. Is that correct? I want you to stop jumping to conclusions that the catalog is corrupted, and I want you to stop jumping to conclusions that Lightroom did something, and very simply explain what you are seeing without trying to identify the cause. Or better yet, provide screen captures by clicking on the "Insert Photos" icon.

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded