Does upgrading of catalog scramble Keyword hierarchies?

Forum|Forum|28 days ago
July 18, 2026
5 replies
61 views

I have a large keyword hierarchy with several layers of parent levels and subcategory levels. After catalog upgrade my keyword structure is in disarray, with keywords scattered into various levels parent to their correct placement in the heirarchy. They aren’t merely duplicated outside their proper place; some keywords have been removed and are missing from their proper place in the hierarchy. I understand that keywords can appear to be “misplaced” if files are imported from an old folder that was improperly moved outside of Lightroom control. This seems different. I may have done something wrong, but I don’t know what it was.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Sounds like you enabled keyword syncing and have existing images in the cloud with keywords. If not, then perhaps something went wrong with the upgrade of the catalog. As Lightroom saved a copy of the old catalog, you can do the upgrade again by opening that copy.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

lowellnelsonAuthor

Inspiring

Thank you Johan.

I do not use the cloud. All images are on external drives, with LR catalog and data on internal iMac SSD. I did discover that, not having paid attention to sync, that my catalog settings had sync function set, unintentionally, to “on” (since set to “off’). Is it possible for the sync function, if set to “on,” to influence a catalog upgrade even if no images are stored in the cloud? In any case, it still greatly puzzles me how that could result in REMOVAL of keywords from their previous location in my keyword hierarchy during a Lightroom upgrade from Lightroom v13 to Lightroom v15.

If I try to recover my previous LR v13 catalog using LR v13, I get a message that the old catalog requires an upgrade, and upgrade results in a message that the catalog cannot be opened because of a “data issue.” I have no idea what is the nature of that “data issue.” Opening of a still previous catalog requires another catalog update, with “optimization” that is ongoing for a day.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

If there are no images in the cloud, then having sync on should not matter.
If you open an old Lightroom 13 in Lightroom 13, then you’ll obviously should not get an upgrade message. That only comes up when you open it in a newer version. Do realise that Lightroom Classic no longer renames the catalog when it upgrades it, so ‘v13’ in the catalog name does not necessarily mean that this is a v13 version catalog. It may have been upgraded. Maybe that was the message you saw (you cannot open a v14 or v15 catalog in Lightroom 13), so try opening it in your current version of Lightroom, not an older one.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

lowellnelsonAuthor

Inspiring

This mess could take me months to unscramble.😖

dj_paige

Legend

I have never had a problem with keywords being scrambled because of a catalog upgrade.

What happens if you try to upgrade a recent backup copy of your catalog?

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