Yesterday I updated my Lightroom catalog to v-12 as prompted when I launched lightroom. However, none of my thousands of existing photos were brought into the new catalog. Is this a known problem? How can I recover my previously cataloged and edited photos without losing anything?
At upgrades, not updates, several members have this problem. Two conditions are required for it to possibly happen:
The preferences file is corrupt
The existing, most recent catalog, is not in the default location.
Now the latter, is not (normally) an issue, many of us do not place are catalogs in the default location. Feel free to continue as such.
Two results may occur
The upgraded catalog is from an older catalog. Many images missing, many folders missing, edits missing.
The supposed upgraded catalog is actually a new catalog, no images, one folder, no edits at all.
Now, this is not absolute, something else may be going on. But what may have occurred is LrC lost track of the proper catalog during upgrade (even though v11 in this case has no such issue) and substituted a catalog in the default folder, or created a new catalog if lacking an existing one in the default folder.
If you had started LrC by double clicking on the correct catalog, as opposed to starting LrC via the normal shortcut, this might not happen , not sure on that. Although a corrupt preference file will eventually foul you up, just not perhaps today.
If you compare folder location between what got upgraded at what was the correct older catalog, you might notice the difference.
Solution is to:
Repair the preference file corruption, Reset/Refresh the preference file.
Upgrade LrC again if you rolled back
Using (this first time) your OS file manager, navigate to the correct catalog, double click on it
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