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visiondancer
Participant
December 14, 2018
Question

Lightroom Classic CC lost 5 months of photos in October 2018 update catalog upgrade

  • December 14, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 422 views

I was working on an end-of-the year photo book as a gift for our family, and discovered that I did not have any photos in Lightroom between May 13th and October 31st 2018! This sent me into a panic—how could I loose over five months of photos?

At first, I thought the issue was my fault, that I'd somehow forgotten to import the photos. With young kids and a busy work schedule over the Fall, it was easy to blame myself. In my panic, I downloaded a copy of PhotoRec and sent it to work on my SD card. It was able to recover several hundred of the missing photos from the SD card, which seemed like a miracle.

Over several late nights, I imported the recovered photos, and went through the process of sorting and adjusting them to pick out the best of those months. Then I published them to SmugMug. It was after publishing that I noticed that several of the photos I had just published were already on SmugMug. My workflow is to import photos into Lightroom, sort and adjust them, and upload the best photos to SmugMug.

It was at this point I realized that I had actually imported the photos into Lightroom, however they were no longer in Lightroom. I went looking through my catalog backups and found the following backups where I still had those photos, and where they were lost.

  • Had photos from May-October 2018:
    • 2018-10-12 0621
      • Lightroom Catalog.lrcat
  • Missing months of photos:
    • 2018-10-24 0848
      • Lightroom Catalog-2.lrcat

When I opened the October 12th 2018 backup, I was prompted to upgrade my catalog, and it renamed the catalog Lightroom Catalog-2.lrcat. When I opened the October 24th backup, I was not prompted to upgrade my catalog, and it already had the Lightroom Catalog-2.lrcat name. When I went back and looked at the folder with my primary Lightroom catalog, I see that the last time that the original copy of Lightroom Catalog.lrcat was modified was also on October 24th 2018, and I've been using a Lightroom Catalog-2.lrcat file since then.

So it seems like something went horribly wrong with the original catalog update on October 24th, 2018 and it lost my photos after May. Working backwards, this seems like around the time that I upgraded to the October 2018 release of Lightroom Classic CC. When I opened the older backups and upgraded those catalogs with the newer version of Lightroom Classic  (Lightroom Classic version: 8.0 [ 1193777 ]), it seems like all of the photos were preserved from that time period.

Unfortunately, I didn't catch the original upgrade catastrophe in October, and I've been importing new photos since October 24th into the Lightroom Catalog-2.lrcat catalog that got screwed up during the upgrade. The other good news is that it seems like all of the original masters are still on my disk. I should have checked this before panicking.

Now I'm concerned that there might be other photos missing in my catalog that I don't even know about. What's the best way to recover from this Lightroom catalog upgrade catastrophe? Is there anyway to compare my older backup to my newer catalog and see which one has more photos in it?

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    2 replies

    Ian Lyons
    Community Expert
    Ian LyonsCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 14, 2018

    Unless the catalog was from Lightroom 6.x or earlier, Lightroom 8 (October 2018) had no reason to update your catalog nor would it have done. Put simply, this is a case of user error/misunderstanding, not an issue with Lightroom.

    V
    visiondancerAuthor
    Participant
    December 14, 2018

    I’ve been using a photography plan subscription since 2015 and keeping Lightroom Classic CC up to date.

    As I wrote above, when I open the 2018-10-12 backup, Lightroom 8 prompts me to upgrade My catalog. When I open the 2018-10-24 backup, it does not prompt me to upgrade my catalog. Do you think that Lightroom Classic CC kept me on a version 6 format catalog until the October 2018 release?

    Ian Lyons
    Community Expert
    Ian LyonsCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    December 14, 2018

    visiondancer  wrote

    Do you think that Lightroom Classic CC kept me on a version 6 format catalog until the October 2018 release?

    No, I'm saying that Lightroom 8 did not upgrade a Lightroom 7 catalog. Therefore, the catalog it upgraded was probably one that had been in your catalog folder since version 6 or earlier.

      dj_paige
      dj_paige
      Legend
      December 14, 2018

      There is no direct way to compare catalogs; you can look at the number of photos for each month or each year in the various different catalogs and see if they match.

      In my guess, the problem is that somewhere along the way, you upgraded Lightroom and the catalog that was upgraded was an older version of your LR catalog, which didn't have the photos May-October 2018. If that is a correct guess, then the problem would not have additional missing photos not in the May-October 2018 time frame. Further, there ought to be, somewhere on one of your hard disks, an .LRCAT file that contains these photos.

      V
      visiondancerAuthor
      Participant
      December 14, 2018

      Yes, as I wrote above, my 2018-10-12 0621 catalog backup contains those missing files. Should I start with that backup and import the newer photos from my primary catalog?

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