Problem when trying to open LR6 catalog in LrC

[Arno_1111]

Good afternoon,

I recently bought Adobe Creative Cloud, end I'm extremely frustrated since I cannot open any of the LR6 catalogs that I have been using for several years.

Would yo have any experience on that problem ?

Thanks for youf feedbacks !

Arno

[AxelMatt]

Depends of the folder name in which the catalog is stored it's possible that the name is to long. In Windows you can use only 256 characters for file names (including folder names).

Try to rename the catalog to an shorter name.

How do I find and move or rename my catalog? | The Lightroom Queen

[JohanElzenga]

And don't worry about the message concerning the missing .lrcat-data. That is a standard message that is shown if .lrcat-data cannot be located, but Lightroom 6 did not create that because it does not have any AI-functions yet.

[Arno_1111]

Thanks

[Arno_1111]

Hello,

Unfortunatly, this is not the case, folder+catalag name = 86 carac.

[Arno_1111]

My catalog and photos are located in a external drive. 

Can it have an impact for import ?

[Rob_Cullen]

Well you are not importing anything yet! You need to get your catalogs opening in Lr-Classic first.

Catalog and photos on an external drive are fine. You would need the external drive connected and visible to Windows. You would need to [Double-click] on the .LRCAT file located on the external drive with File Explorer, and Lr-Classic should open and upgrade the catalog.   Disregard the missing .lrcat-data message.

Did you click the button to [See Adobe Technote] ? I am curious.

Do you still get the "Lightroom encountered problems..." error message when you try again?

[Rob_Cullen · Accepted solution]

Re: The error message "Unable to Upgrade Catalog"-

I have seen this message mentioned in a few forum threads when people upgrade from v6.

One suggested answer is to roll back to a previous version of Lightroom-Classic, upgrade the v6 catalog, then re-install the latest version of LrC (14.1.1) and upgrade the catalog again.

The version to roll back to should be v13.2 or earlier as it has been suggested that v13.3 (and later v14) had a major change to catalog structure and has difficulty reading the v6 catalog.

I would be curious to know if this works for @Arno_1111 

[Arno_1111]

Hello,

Reading LR6 catalog in LrCv13 works. Then when I update to LrCv14, catalog updated in LrCv13 works in Lrcv14 !

Thank you !

[.Michael.]

Please mark Rob_Cullens answer as "Correct answer", thank you.