Caption field in LrC keeps going whacko

[Ralph Hill]

Sorry for the vague term "whacko", but I think that is correct. I have seen multiple crashes while typing into the caption field, many instances of the text shown in the field being not at all what I typed, and different text displayed depending on whether the field is active for editing or not. In short, there are multiple incorrect behaviors that may be related. Hence, it is whacko.

At this point I am restarting LrC about every 5 minutes due to crashes or serious anomalous behavior.  Any suggestions for a work around? 

I can get a video of anomalous behavior if anyone cares.

Bug report info:

1. LrC 13.2 

2. macOS  14.3.1.

3. enter a a bunch of captions. I am working through a set of 60 images. I get maybe 2 or 3 in a row without problems. Then I have to restart. The text is simple English, only letters, space and simple punctuation (“.”, “,”). I have spell checking while typing turned on. The captions are probably less than 40 words.

4. I expect to see the text I type and no crashes. I am seeing crashes and whacko text displayed (not what I typed) and the text displayed changes depending whether the text field is being edited. 

[moved from bugs to discussions according to the community rules - Mod.]

[John R Ellis]

1. Rrestart your computer.

2. If the problem persists, try resetting LR's preferences:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/articles-page/how-do-i-reset-lightrooms-preferences/

LR sometimes soils its preferences file, and resetting it can fix all sorts of wonky behavior. That article explains how to restore the old preferences if resetting doesn't help.

3. If that doesn't help, a screen recording of the entire LR window might give more clues.

[Ralph Hill]

Thanks for the suggestions. Suggestion 2 seems to have helped. Will take time to be sure it fixed the issue. 

I find that idea that I am supposed to blow away my preferences every few months a good sign that there is something broken that needs fixing.

I tried editing my comments in TextEdit and then copy-n-pasted them into LrC. That worked really well. This is the method that I will be using for entering text into LrC in the future.

[John R Ellis]

"I find that idea that I am supposed to blow away my preferences every few months a good sign that there is something broken that needs fixing."

There is an architectural design flaw in the implementation of LR's preferences that's been present since LR 1:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-ideas/p-avoid-preferences-quot-corruption-quot-by-c...

Despite "reset preferences" being one of solutions with the highest fix-it rate in these forums (up there with updating graphics drivers), in my opinion it's unlikely Adobe will ever fix the underlying problem.

[Ralph Hill]

Thanks for taking the time to write that up. Very informative. Also very depressing to think that in a app that hit the market after 2000 the developers could not deal with a pretty simple concurrency issue. That explains a lot. 

I am guessing that the best thing to do (if one wants to use LrC) is to copy the preferences file occasionally, and rollback when there is a problem?  Is it safe to roll back to a previous copy of the preferences file? I just took a quick look at my old and reset preferences files and was surprised by the amount of state information. That might preclude rolling back. Also, I noticed paths to files that may no longer exist and similarly paths to LrC catalogs that have been renamed. Quite distressing to see what LrC has been quietly

squirreling away without verifying.

[Ralph Hill]

Why was this moved to discussions from bugs? This is a 100% reproducable incorrect behavior. That is a bug to me. In what way is this not a bug? That the only useful proposed fix is to blow away the preferences file is further evidence of a bug.

[GoldingD]

Well, from Adobe, for a problem to be posted as a BUG, they state

“something in the software that is not functioning as it was designed to function”.

But that is not the entirety of Bug vs Discussion (naturally Ideas completely different). Also consider

• Not caused by members hardware
• Not caused by members OS
• Not caused my members device drivers
• Not caused by members attached devices (Android comes to mind)
• Not caused by a plug-in (typically third party)
• Not caused by other software (like anti-virus)
• Not caused by members LAN (Some VPN's come to mind)
• Not caused by using unsupported 
• Nit caused buy a crash not involving LrC
• etc.

And to support a bug", it helps if

• Repeatable by other members
• Repeatable by Adobe techs (should the get involved)
• Can be documented step by step leading to a failure.
• Other members also weigh in documenting it to be a bug.

Additional situations that could lead a moderator to move a bug to discussion:

• A posted reply. a solution fixes the issue (such as resetting the  preference file)
• A posted reply, a recommendation in a workflow change fixes the issue, not a workaround but a correction of concept.
• A posted reply directing to a driver update (typically for GPU,) fixes the issue.
• etc

Note that the preference file getting corrupt is not necessarily a bug. If we all had to do so all of a sudden, then maybe.

[Ralph Hill]

Thanks for the thorough explanation. I disagree with how Adobe defines bug. As a professional software developer with 3 photo related apps on the market I have a very different definition. Now that I know more about Adobe’s definition I can adjust my expectations.