Not sure what happened to my catalogue and photos after a recent prompted update

[Kerstin30001826xulu]

Hi community,

I am quite confused and can't even recall 100% what happened. The issue is that I can't find all images I had worked on previously in Lightroom Classic and am not sure how to retrieve the work of perhaps one or two years.

I have done some Lightroom courses, followed the workflow and thought I do the right thing, however I wonder if I've done something completely wrong over the last years in terms of catalogues and backups. I have never figured out how the syncing works between desktop, tablet and phone but that's a different question.

I often have my desktop open and don't shut it down. Whenever I close Lightroom, usually a question pops up if I want to do a backup of the catalogue which I always do. However, I haven't closed it for a long time so haven't done this step for a while and was editing away. I have been using smart collections and find they are a really helpful tool to create selections when edtiting and curating photos.

Recently I was wondering why for some older photos the original wasn't found anymore, but I didn't need them at that time and worked on newer ones just fine.

Then some window popped up regarding a Lightroom update and I thought I should do that so followed the prompts. I can't recall exactly what happened. I thought it was both an update of Lightroom as such and also a backup of the catalogue. I believe it was updated to the cloud in OneDrive but am not sure.

During the update a window popped up displaying "your catalog will be upgraded in order to access the latest changes in this newer version of Lightroom Classics". I had a weird feeling and took a screenshot I emailed myself, see attached.

Weirdly enough when I now open Lightroom Classic , I have only a very small amount of smart collections, and in the left pane, the G harddrive is not displayed where I had worked with for the last year or two. I was able to import a folder of the G hard drive I wanted to work with again, however I can't see any history in the develop mode for individual photos, only the "finished" photo. Weirdly enough, some have still ratings. And the few smart collections I can see are usesell as no photos can be found. 

I don't know what to do and how to retrieve my work from the last 1-2 years. Can anyone put me in the right direction, please? 

Thanks in advance!

[JohanElzenga]

Sounds like Lightroom Classic lost the connection to the upgraded catalog, and so it created a brand new one instead. What you need to do is find that upgraded catalog (the screenshot tells you what to look for). Once you found it, double click it. Lightroom Classic will launch with this catalog and will now know again where it is.

[Kerstin30001826xulu]

Thanks you very much!

[GoldingD · Accepted solution]

see:

• https://lightroomkillertips.com/updated-catalog-looks-wrong/

[Kerstin30001826xulu]

Thank you very much, this worked!