Why does my data keep disappearing?

Question

Hi,

I am relatively new to Lightroom Classic. I just spent the last 2 days entering photo meta data, titles, captions, tagging people, locations, dates etc. To my large collection of family genealogy photos. All of it has disappeared?!?! I entered part of it again. And it’s disappeared?!?! I have been reading a few forums and it looks like other people are having similar problems. Does anyone have a solution? Isn’t Illustrators purpose to organize photos? I feel like I can’t trust it anymore and need to move onto a different program.

I appreciate any help you can give me,

M

dj_paige · Accepted Answer

Just before you entered the info a 2nd time, did you import the photos a 2nd time? Can you give us a step by step description, leaving nothing out, of what you did?

Where are you looking when it seems to you that the metadata disappeared? Are you looking in LrC, or are you looking in your operating system, or somewhere else? Please be specific and detailed.

Actually, >99.9% of LrC users don’t have this problem, and my experience in this forum tells me that the few who do have this problem usually have made a mistake somewhere that causes the problem. So I would say the LrC software is extremely reliable on retaining metadata if used properly. I would trust LrC on this as much as any other program (based on over 20 years of using LrC).

Conrad_C · Answer

When you make any edits in Lightroom Classic, they are saved in the catalog that is currently open. Is there any chance that the next time you used Lightroom Classic, you started a new catalog? If so, any edits in the previous session wouldn’t be in there. They would be in the catalog you made during the previous session.

For background, many of us make one catalog and keep using that one every time. We just import more and more photos into it so we can always have access to all the edits we did in the past, with all of our photos in one catalog.

Then I set up a public album so family could download photos.

Can you say what steps you took to create the public album? The reason I ask is because Lightroom Classic doesn’t have any feature called “album” but Lightroom does. What Lightroom calls and album is what Lightroom Classic calls a “collection” so maybe knowing more about that will help. When you created the new public album, which way did you do it?

In Lightroom Classic, created a new catalog, added and edited images, put them in a collection and synced that to the cloud.
In Lightroom Classic, opened the catalog where the edits were, added images to a collection and synced that to the cloud.
In Lightroom, added images, created an album, put the images in it, and shared it set to Public.
Some other way?

Any ideas on where to reset history? Or find an old version of my file? Or do you think I just need to start from scratch?

Don’t start from scratch. History is in the catalog where the edits were made.

If Lightroom Classic is not set to ask you which catalog to open when it starts up, then choose the command File > Open Recent and look at the list of catalogs in that submenu. Any catalog you worked in recently should be in that menu, so look for the name of the catalog where you made the edits, and choose it.

It’s possible that the confusion is coming from learning Lightroom Classic (local storage based), Lightroom (cloud based), and their cloud system for web albums, all at the same time. Each of them is a lot to learn, and they work differently, so it’s a lot to sort out if you’re new to it.

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