Participant

Question

Unable to locate Catalog and backups after Lightroom crashed

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
March 28, 2025
3 replies
463 views

Hi there

I am on OSX MOnterey and use Lightroom Classic.

Yesterday I was closing Lightroom and while save the catalog, Lightroom crashed.

Unfortunately, the catalog is not there anymore. After re-opening Lightroom is says:

"Cannot find catalog at /Users/myuser/Pictures/Lightroom/mycatalog.lrcat"

The folder "/Users/myuser/Pictures/Lightroom/Backups" does not contain any data.

Somehow everything seems to be deleted (I did not delete anything).

I tried to recover the missing ".lrcat" file using data recovery tools such as "Wondershare", "EaseUs", "Disk Drill" but none of these can find my catalog.

Any idea what happened and how I can recover my catalog?

macOS

D

davidminehart

Inspiring

Is your catalog backup still available, created expressly for use in
situations such as this?

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Is your catalog backup still available, created expressly for use insituations such as this?
By @davidminehart

I don't understand your question. What have my catalog backups to do with your problem?

-- Johan W. Elzenga

dj_paige

Legend

/Users/myuser/Pictures/Lightroom/Backups

This is a backup folder, yet your explanation above seems to indicate you are looking for the non-backup of your catalog file. What do you find if you look at /Users/myuser/Pictures/Lightroom?

Also, use your operating system's search feature to search in ALL folders on ALL disks for files whose name ends with .LRCAT

N

n_9773Author

Participant

A finders' search for "*.lrcat" does not bring any results.

Neither a search on the command line using "find" with unix search syntax does not find any *.lrcat files.

N

n_9773Author

Participant

In directory "/Users/myuser/Pictures/Lightroom" there is just nothing.

I used data recovery tools to may find some files, but nothing has been found.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Do you use Time Machine to regularly backup your Mac?

-- Johan W. Elzenga

N

n_9773Author

Participant

Unfortunately, no.
The last backup of this Macbook is from 2022.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

H'm. That makes me believe that the 'Backups' folder inside your catalog folder is empty for the same reasons: you never made catalog backups in the first place. I'm afraid you've learned the hard way why you should make regular backups. I don't think there is anything you can do to retrieve the disappeared catalog.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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