Hi,
Under many circumstances, whenever your copy of LR crashes, freezes, doesn't start,... the most frequent answer you'll get from the support is "Reset your preferences". And in many cases, that works. But 1) you have to re-configure LR again and 2) this will not fix the bug generating the problem so, it will happen again . Should we be happy with this ? No.
If resetting the Preferences file(s) solves a problem, that's only because
- The piece of LR code reading or writing from or to this file is buggy
OR
- A particular combination of parameters generates a problem.
Do not accept the idea that the Preferences file was corrupted. If it's corrupted, it's by LR itself. Spontaneous file corruption does not occur that often.
Since the developers at Adobe don't seem ready to investigate this case more deeply, I guess it's time to help ourselves and to collect information that could help them debug this issue. There's a few things that are easy to do :
1. Make a backup copy of your Preferences file(s) while LR is behaving correctly. This could also help you restoring a standard behavior instead of resetting the Preferences.
2. When a problem occurs, make a copy of the current Preferences file(s).
3. If resetting the Preferences solves the problem, then make a comparison of the files created in #1 and #2. You can also compare with the new Preferences file(s).
4. Make a ZIP archive of these files possibly including the comparison result and send them to the support or better, post a link to the archive in this thread.
Comparison can be made manually or by using a text comparison tool. I'm personally using Beyond Compare since years (this is not an ad) but there are others (a Google search will show you a lot).
Actually, there are 2 Preferences files :
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences\Lightroom Classic CC 7 Preferences.agprefs
C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences\Lightroom Classic CC 7 Startup Preferences.agprefs
(note that the name didn't change with version 8)
So apply the above to both files. This procedure also applies to the Mac version although I don't know the file path.
Hoping that this will help solve this very old and annoying issue.
--Patrick
26
Replies
AdChoices