Apparently Lost My Old Catalog

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 15, 2025
1 reply
1263 views

This post is essentially an offshoot of another post I created recently asking how to deal with the fact that I'm almost entirely out of space on my laptop running Lightroom (and other Adobe products). It seems like someothing went horribly wrong even before I got the chance to unload all of images to an external drive -- almost all of my images (and presets) are missing! Maybe it's just coincidence, but I clicked on my Lighroom Classic icon as usual, and some kind of box popped up about saving the catelog and how it would not be compatible with older versions of Lightroom, something like that (in retrospect, I seriously wish I screenshoted this). But the bottom line is that when Lightroom loaded, it was like it was brand new installation! It gave me little introductory tour as if I was using it for the first time, etc. It's like the max-out status of my machine caused some mechanism in Lightroom to seriously fail.

The good news for me, if you want to call it that, is that ALL of these files ARE still on my machine. In fact, I'm still maxed out on space (so right now I'm still maxed out on space AND I can't access any of these images in Lightroom, so kind of the worst of both worlds). So it's like the 2024 folder is still there, but that entire folder is missing from my Catelog.

No matter what, it's not like the images are totally gone because, again, they're still on my hard drive. And many of them were never worked on in the first place, but some of them were, and I would hate to lose all of those edits. The question is therefore, is there any way to restore Lightroom to its status before this happened so that I can THEN finally complete the process of moving them to an external drive while still preserving them?

Windows

DClark064

Inspiring

You did not state how you responded to the LrC prompt to backup the catalog and update the catalog to the new version. You should have responded yes. If not, I assume the old catalog is still where it was, so if you find it and double click the catalog file to start LrC, you should get the same prompt and you can respond yes. After it backs up the catalog and updates to the new version, everything should be OK. You can also open LrC and then pull use the File menu, File>Open Recent, to open the previous catalog.

J

Jordan26437343lempAuthor

Inspiring

The reason I didn't state how I handled the box is that I honestly don't remember. The thing is, I didn't think it was that big a deal -- probably just a routine software update. Obviously that was a mistake, but hindsight is 20/20! That said, I almost always so "yes" as that's usually what's recommended, so in all likelihood that's what I did here.

However, I did go to File and Recent Files, and only one file (presumably the one currently loaded -- it has a checkmark next to it) is listed. I assume that's not good?

DClark064

Inspiring

Yes, to the Windows Explorer question. The yearly folders are still there when I navigate to that folder. But it's like they're no longer "connected" to Lightroom.

I'll post not one but two screenshots here. Based on your last and doubt about being able to help me, I held my breath and clicked on what looks like the old Lightroom catelog again and did this time press "no, upgrade the older catalog" to see what happens (first I copied that old catelog file onto an external hard drive to preserve it just in case). And I got a box pop up that I believe was the same one I saw when this all started. I didn't make the same mistake twice and this time screenshotted it immediately.

And then, yes, here is what the Catelog looks like. You'll see that in my original post I said that "almost" all of my images are missing. That's because there are some early test images that rather than being in my yearly folders, were just copied directly from my SD card onto my hard drive. And those for some reason are still there.

I hope these two screenshots kind of say it all! Obviously please let me know if not. Thanks again.

Your second screen shot shows the files are still shown in LrC, so all the editing information is still in the LrC database. But the ? mark indicates LrC does not find the photo files where it expects them to be. You say the files are there when you look in Windows Explorer, but are they on the same drive and in the same folders that LrC has them in? I suspect the answer is no. I assume that you moved some files using Explorer and LrC needs to re-linked to their current location.

Usually when the ? appears, all that is needed is to right click the highest level folder with a ? mark (in this case the DCIM folder) and then locate that folder. LrC will then update the location in its database and you are OK.

If you either deleted them or moved them into a variety of other folders, the best method is probably to move them back into their original location, and the ? mark will disappear.

The safest way to move photo files that are in the LrC database, is to move them in LrC, not Explorer. If you need to move folders with large numbers of files, it is faster to move folders using Explorer and then use LrC to locate the folders in their new locations.

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I missed the part about these being a recent copy from the card. You can recover them as described above.

The bigger question is what happened to all the other files in your LrC database.

You need to examine all the LrC catalog files you have, including the ones in your backup folder. It appears that at some point you lost all the files in the database. You should be able to see the last catalog that has all your data by looking at the size of the catalog (i.e. the lrcat file). I believe you will see that at some point the file size dropped a lot.

Open the last file that has a large size by copying it to your Lightroom folder, then double click it. When it asks you to update, say yes, and be sure to give it a new name. That should get you back to where you were before a lot of stuff got deleted from the database. Once that is done, assess what may be missing. Hopefully you have a recent backup lrcat file so that only a few recent photos are missing.

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