All Plug-Ins grayed out

[christer1549]

 I have a bug in my installation (LrC 14.1.1 and a MacMini M1 with MacOs Sonoma). The bug is that the Plug-ins for editing are all grayed out BUT if I delete the Helper file before starting LrC the Plug-Ins are not grayed out!

[Moved from ‘Bugs’ to ‘Discussions’ by moderator, according to forum rules.]

[johnrellis]

Is there at least one photo imported into the catalog and is a photo selected when you invoke the plugin command?  (Sometimes users get confused when they start a new catalog and observe that many plugin commands are greyed out.)

[christer1549]

I have thousands of photos and I am quite used to LrC since meny years - but this started with version 14.1.1 and as I wrote, if I delete the "Catalog Helper.lrdata" file it works for a while. I haven't found out when/why,  but suddenenly the plug-ins are grayed out and I have to quit, delete the Helper file and restart LrC. 

[johnrellis]

The issue with a new, empty catalog has confused many experienced users, which is why I asked.

[christer1549]

I see, but this is quit obvious a bug. I now found that there are another thing that seems to be connected to this. When the plug-ins are grayed, I cannot create new collections. 

[JohanElzenga]

A bug is normally seen by lots of people, but I have not seen any other report about this problem. That makes me think this is something on your computer. Have you tried resetting the preferences? Corrupted preferences can lead to all kinds of unexpected behavior.

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/how-do-i-reset-lightrooms-preferences/

[christer1549]

I resetted the preferences, it didn't make any difference.

I agree that other people should see this also but there are a lot of combinations: cpu hardware, OS, LrC version, disks setup and maybe other things that I don't know of...

[JohanElzenga]

There are not that many possible variations of a Mac Mini M1 running MacOS Sonoma, so for now I don't buy that. What plugins have you installed?

[christer1549]

The only thing I know is that something in the "Catalog name" Helper.lrdata (or the mere existance of it - which, in MacOS at least, is a link to a directory) does this. 

[JohanElzenga]

'Catalogname Helper.lrdata' is a normal part of your catalog. If you remove it then Lightroom Classic rebuilds it. It sounds like this package is getting corrupted by whatever is causing this. What plugins do you have installed?

[christer1549]

[JohanElzenga]

Those are the presets for (some of) your plugins. You can also have plugins that do other things than editing images however, and they do not have a preset in the 'Edit in' menu. You can see what plugins are installed in the plugin manager. It looks like Lightroom Classic is somehow losing the connection to the image. You can also not edit it in Photoshop, and you cannot create a virtual copy either.

This could also be catalog corruption. The corruption in the catalog would then cause the Helper file to become corrupted. You can check if that is the case by creating a new catalog, importing a handful of images in that catalog, and see if that catalog gets the same problems after a short while or not.

[christer1549]

You seem to be right! In the new catalog I opened it works as it should. The question is now: Is there a way to fix the corrupt catalog? So I just start on a new catalog for the upcoming pictures and import the old pics if I need to edit them.

In the future it would be great if LrC could detect a corrupt catalog - it would save a lot of work for us paying customers!  (And for you 🙂 )

Anyway, thanks a lot for the help!

[christer1549]

Hm, forget about the "fix a corrupt catalog" - it would actually be smart to create a new catalog every year...

[JohanElzenga]

What you could try is this: Create a brand new catalog and choose 'File - Import from Another Catalog'. Select your old catalog to import. In the import dialog choose to import all photos, but do not move them. This will create an exact copy of your old catalog, but usually without the corruption. The only thing that won't come across is any publishing services you may have. You will have to recreate those. If you synced your catalog then you will have to enable sync for the new catalog. There are some reports that this could cause a problem. Here’s how to solve that: https://www.danhartfordphoto.com/blog/2025/1/lr026-fixing-sync-problems-caused-by-switching-the-sync...