why have my masks disappeared after LrC closed?

Forum|Forum|1 month ago
June 19, 2026
3 replies
65 views

I added masks to about 140 photos yesterday, closed Lightroom Classic and when I reopened LrC, about 50 images had lost their masks; I can’t think of any steps that I had done to delete these masks, and I have .xmp files being created for all of my images, so I don’t understand how I lost the masks.

I do have a fairly large (probably around 50,000’ish, could be more) collection of images on my hard drives, and my LrC catalogue is getting quite large (it takes a while to save); I’m not sure if this has affected LrC saving my masks.

I’m a reasonably advanced LrC user, and this is the first time that this has happened to me (I’ve been using LrC extensively for about 3-4 years).

Any reason why (like user error?) that I could have lost my masks?

Nuke_ET42

Participating Frequently

I’m having a similar problem. I am editing some corporate headshots and any AI assisted masking fails after I select another image. Masks created with brushes stay, but masks like select subject, or select person show up in the mask, but have no selection. I edit the image with the masks. everything looks good, and then move to the next image. When I return to the previous image, the masks are hosed. I’ve never seen this before and I’ve used lightroom for years. I’ve restarted lightroom and rebooted the PC and neither fixes the problem. Any help would be appreciated.

dj_paige

Legend

@Nuke_ET42

Your “similar” problem really belongs in its own thread, and not in someone else’s thread. People will be happy to help you if you explain your problem in a new thread.

dj_paige

Legend

It has nothing to do with the size of your catalog, which is fine. It takes a long time to save if you have started using the AI tools a lot, which take up a lot of space and so the backup takes longer. So this is not unusual.

It has nothing to do with .xmp files, which are irrelevant to this issue.

If this icon orange or yellow? If so, click on it and your masks should appear.

If that’s not it, please look at the History Panel in the Develop module to see if your masking edits are present. If the masking edits are present, were they turned off in a subsequent step? Please show us a screen capture of the ENTIRE history panel for one of these problem photos.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Let’s get a few misunderstandings out of the wat first. A 50,000 images catalog is not large, you need to add another zero before the catalog is considered large, so that won’t have played any part. Saving to XMP also does not play any part. That’s an extra option that does not affect anything in the catalog (but you could use ‘read metadata from file’ on one of the images to see if the mask details are still in the XMP file). And finally, Lightroom Classic catalogs do not need to be ‘saved’. Changes are written to it instantaneously, so ‘saving’ a catalog (like you save an image in Photoshop) doesn’t really take place. You possibly mean that backing up the catalog takes a while.

What kind of masks were these? Did you actually make edits in the masks before you went to work on the next image?

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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