No folders showing in Navigation Pane

[shayb68441784]

*Solved- Resetting preferences and deleteing all previews seems to have cured the issue.
Looking for some help here. For the last few days, when I open LRc no folders or folder structure appears in my Library Navigation Pane, only a filter folders box is there. (see photo)

I can go to catalog>all photos and everything is there, but under folders it's completely blank. I can go to Collections and all is normal and working there. Eventually it (slowly) fixes itself and repopulates the folder structure, but something is very wrong. When folders are missing, if I try to right click a photo I get no dialog box, no way to chose "show folder in Library". I have Windows 11 and Nvidia 4080, everything current and up to date including GPU driver. All other functions on my PC are perfect and Photoshop is functioning perfectly. Also today my LR crashed during a large export, which has NEVER happened before. I don't know if I should reset LR preferences or reinstall LR? Or is it maybe a corrupt catalog, and if so, how can I fix it? (it's a large catalog)   Any thoughts?

[johnrellis · Accepted solution]

Initial troubleshooting steps:

1. 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.

2. Try deleting the Helper.lrdata folder:

a) Do Catalog Settings > General > Show to open Finder / File Explorer on the current catalog folder.
b) Exit LR.
c) In that folder, delete the folder "<catalog> Helper.lrdata".
d) Restart LR, and it will rebuild the folder.

The Helper.lrdata folder caches information about metadata, keywords, folders, collections, and other things to speed the performance of LR and it can sometimes get corrupted. In recent versions, LR has used it more heavily to improve the speed of displaying metadata, and there have been a fair number of bugs with it.

3. If those steps don't help, do the LR menu command Help > System Info and copy/paste the entire contents here so we can see exactly which versions of hardware and software LR thinks you're running and important LR options that are set.

[shayb68441784]

Thank you John, resetting preferences and deleteing all previews seems to have cured the issue. (I hope!)

[dj_paige]

You have accidentally opened a blank catalog. You need to go to File->Open Recent and try opening each catalog in that list until you find the one that shows your photos. If that doesn't work, use your operating system's search feature to find all file(s) on all disk(s) that have a name that ends with .LRCAT and then open each one found until you find the catalog file you want. And you do have recent backups of your  catalog file, don't you?

[richardplondon]

If you can still see Collections and images inside those, this is not an empty Catalog accidentally opened.

The Folders panel is in effect a dynamic "database report" of what location information is held against every 'imported' file - which merely means, 'registered' - and summarising all of that in the form of a clickable listing.

This listing is I think not continually re-generated afresh, but cached - and updated to follow your actions such as removing or adding images or their folders, or actively updating their location info. If that cached listing has become corrupted in this current Catalog then IMO that may explain the symptoms fully. Proper information is clearly there somehow on each photo, if that listing does successfully rebuild or partly so - within a given session of using the program. But that rebuilt listing is not then 'sticking' for a subsequent session.

I am presuming your storage location is not changing in address - for example, appearing under different assigned drive letters at different moments. If that were the case, this drive letter (or network URL) should first be fixed as constant and persisting.

One tactic for dealing with Catalog corruption that is safe to try: create an entirely new fresh Catalog, empty. Then use "import from another Catalog", selecting your current Catalog as the source for this - in this case including all contents (for other purposes it is possible to be more selective).

This function creates catalog records inside the destination Catalog, each corresponding to a photo present in the source Catalog. So that happens afresh, in a properly indexed and clean way, leaving behind any database structure problems that the old Catalog may have suffered from. If any particular image record was itself not properly readable I believe that image would be simply skipped over, so you would  be left with only all good data.

These records replicate not only all the latest editing but also prior edit history and all the virtual organisation: keywords, stacking, virtual copies, collection membership etc. Matching static Collections and Collection Sets, and Smart Collections, are therefore created.

If importing library into this new Catalog has successfully fixed the issue you can just go forward with that (and discard the old Caatalog). If unsuccessful you can abandon the trial (and discard the new one). There will have been no duplication of the image files themselves and no changes made to the old Catalog that you've merged images in from.

You can expect this fresh Catalog to ask for new Library previews to be generated. But you do not need to wait until that is completed, before you can establish whether everything you want is present. 

If this approach has not been successful: corruption in the source Catalog may have extended more deeply and you may have no choice but to fall back on restoring a whole Catalog backup: the most recent available which does not exhibit the bad behaviour.

[dj_paige]

If you can still see Collections and images inside those, this is not an empty Catalog accidentally opened.

By @richardplondon

But it could still be that the WRONG catalog file was opened.

[shayb68441784]

Thanks Richard, I did not know about that method of creating a new catalog and importing. I'll file that away in my brain in case I ever need it!