Since upgrading to Mac Os Monterey, my Lightroom 5 won't crop photos - help!

[Sarah23151245nsd8]

Hello! Can anyone help? I'm editing some photos for the first time since I upgraded to Monterey and the Crop function isn't behaving at all and won't allow me to crop images. Has anyone experienced this? Is there something I can do? I've noticed I'm on Lightroom 5 - is this very out of date now? Do I need to upgrade my Lightroom to work with Monterey? Any help or suggestions would be gratefully recieved, thank you. Sarah.

[Jim Wilde]

Can we check you version number (there are two Lightroom 5s, the old perpetual license version, and the newer cloud-centric version)? Do Help>System Info and post a screenshot of the first dozen lines of the result.

It's probable that you are running the old version, and so you need to be aware that because of the age of the software (Adobe stopped support of that version in 2015 I believe), the probability is that it will increasingly have problems if the underlying operating system software continues to be upgraded. If the problems you are experiencing are the result of the upgrade to Monterey, which is likely, the best course of action would be to upgrade to the latest version, called Lightroom Classic (which is currently at version 11.2)....but this is only available via a subscription. It is no longer possible to purchase a perpetual license upgrade.

[Sarah23151245nsd8]

Dear Jim,

Thank you so much for your prompt reply. I hope the two screengrabs here confirm exactly what version of Lightroom 5 I am using?

Thank you for letting me know about the new subscription that is in place with Adobe. What a shame that one has to take on a subscription these days - I use Lightroom every few months to edit my family photos - it doesn't seem worth the price of a subscription, gah!

Thank you again, Sarah

[Jim Wilde]

Thanks for the screenshots, and as expected they confirm that you are using the obsolete perpetual-license version of Lightroom 5. I don't know if it is possible to get the crop tool working under Monterey, we'd need to hear from any other Monterey users that are still running LR5. I know it can still be run on Windows 10, but that's probably of no help to you. A big part of the problem is that LR5 (and LR6) cannot be installed on any MacOS version from Catalina onwards, as these versions are 64-bit only and the LR5 and 6 installers use 32-bit code (you CAN bring over a currently installed version via migration, but you cannot re-install it if needed). That in itself reduces significantly the number of potential LR5/Monterey users whose experience we can draw upon. Adobe stopped supporting LR5 back in 2015, so they will be unable to assist with this issue, which probably leaves only some helpful users on this community forum.

In terms of options, from an Adobe perspective there is now only a subscription option, though there are of course non-Adobe options which are still available via one-off license payments.

[Jim Wilde]

Out of interest, I just installed LR5.7.1 on my Big Sur system, and crop is working fine.....so it may be purely a problem specific to Monterey. Maybe reverting to Big Sur might be an option for you?