LrC crashing immediately on startup M3 Mac

Question

i've recently migrated from an Intel mac to an M3. I'm running LrC version 13.1; Sonoma 14.1.1

Photoshop, Bridge, Indesign all work perfectly. LrC crashes immediately on startup - the splash screen appears for a moment then it vanishes. i've read through some older threads and here's what I've tried so far:

- uninstalled and reinstalled LrC multiple times (including older versions) and rebooted

- checked read/write permissions for Adobe log file (fine)

- deleted LrC preferences (option/shift when starting the application)

- disabled literally ALL login items and restarted - makes no difference

- deleted all of LRC's library files

However ... I've also created a new user and tried starting LrC from that account - and it starts up just fine.

clearly there's an issue with my account, but i'm at a loss as to what it might be. i've sent error reports to Adobe, so there should be some logged somewhere under my email address

tia 🙂

Genie

Genie69234522603 · Accepted Answer

I posted this question two years ago and didn’t get a useful response - reposting it here as the topic has now been closed for replies.

two years later - with the help of ChatGPT - I finally worked out what was going on …..

the root cause: ~/Documents was a dangling immutable symlink left behind by Dropbox Mac Backup after migration to a new Mac. Lightroom Classic failed during startup because it could not create/access the standard Documents directory (AgPathUtils.getStandardFilePath: can't create directory at /Users/eugenieshinkle/Documents).

the solution: Removed the immutable flag from the symlink (chflags -h nouchg), removed the dangling symlink, allowing macOS to recreate a normal ~/Documents directory. Lightroom then launched normally and continued to function correctly across restarts.

I’d love to know if anyone has seen this before

GoldingD · Answer

uninstalled and reinstalled LrC multiple times (including older versions) and rebootedchecked read/write permissions for Adobe log file (fine)deleted LrC preferences (option/shift when starting the application)disabled literally ALL login items and restarted - makes no differencedeleted all of LRC's library files  While you did state:checked read/write permissions for Adobe log file I do not think that is the same as allowing LrC permission as described in the following link, that I do not see in your list of attempts https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/allow-permissions.html hmm, do I have tthe correct link?

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