P: Catalog migration stuck while upgrading to LrC v15

[DenisPac]

Hello,

Not sure this is a bug, but worth posting here to get your feedback.

My catalog contains about 400k images and videos.

In the last months, its size increased a lot from about 7GB in Nov 2024 up to almost 39GB now; just before the upgrade to LrC v15.

I ran the LrC upgrade this morning (7-8 hours ago). The software upgrade went well in a few minutes, with all other Adobe upgrades, then the catalog migration started.

Since that time, I get the catalog upgrade message with no change since the beginning. See attached screenshot. It says "Not responding" since the beginning as well.

I wxanted to understand what's going on, so I looked at the folder where my catalog is stored. The previous catalog v14 has been backued up in a separate folder "Old Lightroom Catalogs" that I then moved to a separate drive. I can also see a temporaryRepairedCatalogue.lrcat growing slowly, very slowly. Its size is now about 2GB. That's means the catalog upgrade is actually processing, but it is so slow!

At the current speed, and assuming the new catalog will have about the same size as the current one, it will require more than 5 days to get it upgraded! If nothing fails...

Note that the catalog is stored on a pretty fast NVME drive.

Does any of you encounter this issue?

What can I do, except waiting?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Denis

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @DenisPac

Thanks for reaching out, and apologies for the experience. We’ve received similar reports from other users, and in most cases, the issue was related to limited storage space. Copying the original catalog to a drive with sufficient free space helped resolve the problem.

Could you please try that and let us know how it goes?

Regards,

Srishti

[DenisPac]

Hello Srishti,

Indeed, this was the cause of my issue.

I had to delete partially the content of Previews.lrdata folder as it was using a huge space of my drive with about 230GB! I've read that I can delete these previews, so I did.

To avoid such issue, LrC could check the available space before procedding with the upgrade.

Thank you for your help!

Denis

[Antoni Serrano]

He instalado la versión 15 y cuando se actualiza el catálogo de la versión 14.5.1 al final aparece el mensaje de la imagen adjunta.
Envío también una captura de pantalla de los archivos que se crean durante el proceso

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @Antoni Serrano 

Sorry to hear about this experience. Thanks for sharing the details and screenshots! It looks like the catalog upgrade process from 14.5.1 to 15 didn’t complete properly. For now, I’d suggest staying on your current version until we can confirm a stable migration path.

Here are a few steps you can try:

• First, experiment with a Catalog backup (you’ll need to extract it from its compressed archive before use).

• Next, create a new, empty Catalog in the new version, then try Import from Another Catalog using your existing one. This process attempts to upconvert on the fly but may not always succeed.

• Alternatively, create a new, empty Catalog in the old version, then Import from Another Catalog to merge your current catalog data. Once that’s done, try upgrading this fresh catalog to the new version.

This approach preserves all key catalog data — edits, collections, virtual copies, and history steps — though some settings like publish services or unused keywords might not carry over. 

If you’re syncing to the cloud, keep in mind that sync works with only one catalog at a time, so you may need to re-enable sync for the active one. Refer to this similar post for more details: https://adobe.ly/4nu6O6P;

Regards,

Srishti

[KenC_18700]

I tried your suggestion. 1. Catalog backup was successful in 14.5.1  2. Updated LrC to V15 3. Opened V15 with a new, empty catalog 4. Import Catalog. IT FAILED.  See attached screen shot for error message.  5. Per error message, tried to upgrade the catalog directly. IT FAILED. Please see anothe screen shot.  

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @DenisPac

Thanks for confirming! I’ve shared your feedback with the team for future updates. Please feel free to reach out if you have any other questions.

Regards,

Srishti

[Stef M.]

Bonjour à tous

Suite à la mise à jour vers Lightroom classic 15, à l'ouverture de mon catalogue une fenêtre ouvert demandant de mettre à jour le catalogue. Suite à cette mise à jour du catalogue, rien aucunes photos. Je suis sur Mac Tahoe 26.0.1 

[Stef M.]

J'ai oublié mon catalogue est sur un disque SSD externe, et je n'ai jamais eu de problème avant la mise à jour.

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @Stef M.

Thanks for reaching out, and apologies for the experience. We’ve received similar reports from other users, and in most cases, the issue was related to limited storage space. Copying the original catalog to a drive with sufficient free space helped resolve the problem.

Could you please try that and let us know how it goes?

Regards,

Srishti

[Stef M.]

Pour l'espace disponible sur mon disque SSD externe (Samsung T7 Shield 2 To), j'ai 645 Go de disponible et ça ne fonctionne pas. Donc j'ai copié mon catalogue original sur une clé USB de 128 Go et le mise à jour a fonctionné. J'ai aussi copié mon catalogue sur mon disque interne de mon MacBook Pro M4 pro avec seulement 22,05 Go de disponible et la mise à jour du catalogue a aussi fonctionné. Sur un autre disque externe aussi un (Samsung T7 Shield 2 To) que j'utilise aussi avec Lightroom, j'ai copié le catalogue original et la mise à jour m'a pas fonctionné malgré le 735 Go de disponible. Mais sur ce dernier disque j'avais un autre catalogue soit pour l'année 2024 et la mise à jour avec Lightroom classic 15 a fonctionné du premier coup. Peut-être un bogue avec les disque Samsung T7 Shield ? 

[KR Seals]

Are you sure it actually updated the Lr V14 catalog? I sounds like it made a new catalog instead. 
Try double clicking on the LrC V14 catalog. That will start LrC V15 where it should ask again to do the update.

As @Srishti Bali said, be sure you have lots of space on the drive in use.

[Stef M.]

Merci pour votre réponse. Je suis certain que le catalogue est bien un V14 et pour l'espace libre sur mon disque externe est de 645 Go.

[dj_paige]

Lightroom Classic has accidentally upgraded the wrong catalog. You need to find the proper catalog on your hard disk, and then upgrade that catalog. You can use your operating system's search feature to find all files on all disks whose name ends with .LRCAT and then open each one found until you open the catalog you want. Probably each of these catalogs will have to be upgraded to LrC 15 when you try to open each one.

The type of disk (SSD) is irrelevant.

[Stef M.]

Lightroom ne peut pas avoir accidentellement mis à jour le mauvais catalogue, car c'est le seul catalogue sur mon disque externe, qui a toujours fonctionné. Le fichier est bien un fichier .LRCAT. Merci quand même pour votre réponse.

[dj_paige]

I suspect you do have more than one catalog, and you are just not aware of it. This has indeed happened to people before, scroll down to the bottom of this thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/all-my-lrc-edits-seem-to-have-disappear...

Please use your operating system's search feature to search all disk(s) and all folders for files whose name ends with .LRCAT

[Frederick Jansohn]

Hi Sameer,

While I already had posted an inquiry I'm not sure its conents are totally relevant any longer. When attempting today to open up Lightroom Classic v. 14 I got the surprise (to me) screen prompting me to upgrading to LrC v.15. After some minor research around upgrading I hit the "upgrade" button. As of writing that was about 3 hours ago. Eventually the program tried to load but only a small screen, box like, appeared in the upper left of my computer monitor screen. It was a partial view of the first screen from which editing takes place in LrC, showing a partial view of a number of images in the film strip of the last set of images I had edited just two days ago. This was accompanied by the "dreaded" blue status circle going round and round endlessly.  Finally I saw at the top of this partial view of the LrC developer screen the words (Not responding). This was after I had tried to maximise the view by hitting the minimise/maximise button. I then clicked on the red button in the upper right hand corner and I got the error message "the program is not responding" and prompted me to either close or wait for a response. I'm actually still waiting (3 hours later) and now still seeing the "Not Responding" message. It seems that in trying to upgrade itself the program is frozen leaving me with nothing with which to edit recent photos. I am at a complete loss as to know what to do or how to do it. Can you help please? Look forward to your speediest reply. Many thanks in advance, Cheers, Fred Jansohn 

[AxelMatt]

@Frederick Jansohn  

You’ve reactivated an old thread. You describe your issue. Also, you're not giving us any information about your system and what you've tried so far. It may seem like it's the same problem, but it may not be.

I've branched your post into a new thread.

First try to reset the preferences of Lightroom Classic:  How to reset Lightroom Classic preferences (adobe.com)

It's recommended to backup your preferences before you reset the preferences to the default settings: 

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/preference-file-and-other-file-locations.html

If this doesn't help we need more informations about your environment.

Is your system up-to-date? Do you have installed all recent updates and patches for the operating system and the device drivers, especially the graphic driver. Please make also sure that you have installed the Studio version and not the Game Ready version of your NVidia driver.

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @Stef M.  Thank you for sharing these details. I’ve forwarded them to the team, but they’ll need a bit more information to investigate further.

@Stef M. @DenisPac @Frederick Jansohn @KR Seals  @Antoni Serrano  If any one of you is still experiencing this issue, please share your Catalog files (.lrcat and .lrcat-data files) — this will help us better understand the problem. Upload it to any cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox and share the link here.  If you’re not comfortable sharing the catalog publicly, you can send it via DM instead. Just click on my name to open my profile, and you’ll see an option to send Message there.

[KR Seals]

@Srishti Bali I'm hoping the users with this issue will get it resolved. In my case, I have updated LrC on two Win11 computers and a M1 MBP MAX. All upgrades went perfectly. All of my normal operations in LrC are working properly.