P: Crashes When Syncing

[Jeff A. Goulden]

The issue of Lightroom Classic freezing and crashing when syncing collections to lightroom.adobe.com was addressed in the list of bug fixes included in the new Lightroom Classic version 12.4. It did not help. I installed 12.4 this morning. I was able to sync a few collections and then it crashed. I cleared lightroom.adobe.com and removed All Synced Photographs and tried again. This time it crashed in a different spot. Sometimes it crashes when I am not syncing. I have had it crash upon importing files.  I have had it crash after opening the program.  I am totally baffled.

This has been going on since March 5th, 2023.  I have been in contact with Adobe Technical Support numerous times and have had to explain the problem to a different person each time.  I asked that the problem be escalated and they dumped and uploaded some log files.  They were supposed to analyze the logs and get back to me.  That didn't happen.

I have tried everything suggested to me by Adobe and in the forums.  The Adobe techs have been into my system and messed things up a couple of times.  Nothing has helped.  I am frequently testing the integrity of my catalog and it passes the test each time so I know that my catalog is not corrupted.

Anyway, if you are still on an older version of Lightroom and having this problem, upgrading to 12.4 will probably not help.

By the way I am running Windows 11.  Not sure if that has anything to do with this problem.

[suhas_mutmurdu]

Hi, apologies for delayed response. We collected and analysed data from our crash reporter data. This issue is occuring because of some hard disk bad sector error. Few users have reported the same hard disk error and found out that running a disk diagnosis resolves the issue. You can refer to below link to check for hard disk errors and clear it from your machine. 
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/chkdsk?tabs=event-v...

Please try syncing from LrC after clearing the hard disk bad sector errors, and let us know your feedback. 
Thank you

[Jeff A. Goulden]

I am pleased that the problem was identified and a workaround found.  However, I do feel that Lightroom Classic could have handled it better and identified the problem at the time it was found.  Having the program just freeze and then subsequently crash is not an acceptable way to handle the problem.  I noticed that when developing single files, Lightroom Classic will report when it cannot read the original file due to file corruption.  Perhaps the syncing process could incorporate the same or similar logic to report an unreadable file.  This freezing and crashing problem literally cost me 6 weeks of production time and I feel that shouldn't have happened.

[Rikk Flohr: Photography]

See post from @suhas_mutmurdu  for resolution

[suhas_mutmurdu]

Glad to know that the workaroud resolved your issue. Thanks for confirming. 

[Jeff A. Goulden]

Just to be clear, I ran "chkdsk d: /f /r /x".  This resulted in the repair of a half dozen or so sectors.  Several photo files were named and were known files involved in the syncing to lightroom.adobe.com.  After testing that syncing was now working properly, I installed an additional new internal hard drive p: that is dedicated to Lightroom and photo files.  Everything has worked fine since.