Metadata lost after upgrading from v12 to v13

[baconsocrispy]

I just upgraded from Lightroom Classic v12 to v13 and I'm missing a significant amount of metadata. I have about 21000 images in my catalog and the people were tagged in all of them (painstakingly over years). Now LRC is showing ~10000 unnamed people that had previously been tagged. How do I resolve this? I assume that data still exists in the v12 catalog file. Thanks to anyone who can help.

[JohanElzenga]

Are you sure you upgraded the correct catalog? Lightroom Classic 13.3 requires a new catalog upgrade, so people who used version 13.2 will see their catalog upgraded from V13 to V13-3. You talk about upgrading from V12 to V13 however.

[baconsocrispy]

Hi. Thanks for your quick reply. I was using Lightroom Classic v12 and must have updated it to v13 (I don't know when I did this). When I opened the app today it said that I needed to upgrade my catalog for it to work with the new version. So I hit upgrade and seem to have lost a lot of metadata. When I look in the folder where LRC saves the catalog data, I can see a v12.lrcat and v13.lrcat and lrcat-data files for each one. I imagine the v12.lrcat still has all  my metadata still correctly stored. 

[dj_paige]

You have probably upgraded the wrong catalog. Do a search, using your operating system's search feature, of all folders on all disks. Find all files whose name ends with .LRCAT. Open each one by double-clicking on it until you find the catalog you want.

[JohanElzenga]

If you don't even know yourself what version you were using, you make it hard on yourself and on us. Anyway, let me explain what I think is the most likely cause. This week Lightroom Classic 13.2 was updated to 13.3 and that requires a catalog upgrade too. Usually catalog upgrades are only needed with a full number upgrade, like from version 12 to 13. You say you upgraded from version 12 to 13 this week, but that sounds too much of a coincidence. I think you upgraded from 13.2 to 13.3, so that means you must have a Catalog-V13 somewhere that was not upgraded this week, but was your main catalog until recently. If Lightroom had upgraded this catalog, you would now have a 'Catalogname-V13-3' catalog and apparently you don't.

That is the reason why I think the V12 catalog is old, old enough to not have those metadata. And when that catalog was upgraded by mistake (rather than the V13 located elsewhere), you ended up with this V13 catalog that is missing all these metadata. So search your hard disk for Lightroom catalogs, particularly a Lightroom V13 catalog that has a modification date of a few days old. That may be your main catalog, so open that catalog in Lightroom Classic and let it be upgraded to V13-3.

[baconsocrispy]

Thanks again for your responses and bearing with me. I performed the search and I have catalogs from both v12 (last update Jan 8, 2024) and v13 (updated today from the v12 catalog). I downgraded the version back to 12 to open the older catalog and see if there was a difference and that catalog also showed 10k unnamed people that I know I tagged so the issue does not seem to be with the catalog upgrade. That data must have been lost somewhere else along the way. I appreciate the help but suppose this data is not retrievable since I don't know what could have happened and I'll need to retag.

[JohanElzenga]

Do you make catalog backups? If so, you may be able to find a backup that still has these metadata. If not, the. I am afraid you will have no way to retrieve them.