Inspiring

Answered

The Export dialog box doesn't appear

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
January 4, 2025
10 replies
3408 views

Hello,

I'm having a major problem with Lightroom Classic v14.1.1. that I've never had before. I'm a professional photographer and I use Lightroom as my main photo management and editing tool. The thing is that yesterday I tried to export a set of images and to my surprise the export window didn't appear. I thought it was a one-off error, so I restarted Lightroom. Everything remained the same, the export window didn't appear. I restarted the computer and tried again: everything was the same. I reset Lightroom preferences and nothing at all. I uninstalled Lightroom, tried previous versions and everything is the same. For some reason the export window has stopped appearing and I can't export anything at all. Sometimes, maybe after half an hour, the screen appears with a delay, when I've forgotten about it. But usually it never appears. It's strange, because it's not an error generated by updating, but it was sudden. I've been using this latest version for a few days and nothing has happened, I even exported a photo session a few days ago without any problems and now I'm faced with this.

I'm also quite disappointed with ADOBE's online help. I contacted them yesterday and they started to help me but we got to the point where they needed to connect to my computer remotely to see things and I had to leave, so we agreed to continue today, but it turns out that today there is no support service. I don't know... I think they are tools that we use to work and they should have minimum services. I'm terrified of getting to next Monday and not being able to send my pending work because I can't export it.

I hope you can help me. Greetings and thank you very much in advance.

Windows

Correct answer juancalagares

Hi!

I'll update you on how this issue has been resolved.

I tried what the user @JohanElzenga suggested. Creating a new catalog and importing the old one into this new one took about 7 hours. When it finished everything seemed to work. However, the third or fourth time I hit export, the problem occurred again and the export window stopped appearing.

As it was already a working day, I contacted Adobe's specialized technical service again and a Lightroom specialist agent connected remotely to my computer. We did some checks and concluded (also) that the catalog had been corrupted. As I make a weekly backup of this, we took the copy from last week and did some checks. Everything worked fine with this catalog from a week earlier.

The conclusion was to try to recover my last catalog from this one. The progress I had made in that week would be exported as a catalog and incorporated into this old catalog, to update it to how my current catalog was.

This issue has made me think. Adobe recommends working with a single catalog. However, as my catalog grows, the performance of my Lightroom is getting worse, slower and heavier. Of course, there are 280,000 photos, most of them 42mpx. While I was testing with the Adobe agent, we created a new catalog with about 100 photos and Lightroom worked like a charm.

Is it okay to have such large catalogs? Does it really not affect the performance of our computer? Before the catalog was corrupted, Lightroom left my computer completely dead. And I don't have a bad computer: Core 9 ultra, 64gb ram, Nvidia GForce 4070, photos and catalog on SSD drives... It's just a thought, but... What do you think?

Browneye1967

Inspiring

I am also having this problem. Is this a 14.1 issue? Corrupting catalogs?

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

No, this is not a 14.1 issue, but a corrupted catalog can happen at any time. That is why making regular backups is so important.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

D

DigiAlex

Participant

I have had the same problem for a few days and have been trying in vain to fix it. Now I'm trying to export part of the catalog to a new one, because I want to split the catalog into 2 parts, because I think two smaller ones are better than one big one, but that will take days, I have 380,000 images on a network. The catalog is stored locally and the new catalog is also generated locally (unfortunately only possible locally), but it still takes a long time. I hope that this is the permanent solution or should I proceed differently? Unfortunately, I no longer have a backup of the catalog where everything was still OK, as I have a backup created every day.

J

juancalagaresAuthorCorrect answer

Inspiring

Hi!

I'll update you on how this issue has been resolved.

I tried what the user @JohanElzenga suggested. Creating a new catalog and importing the old one into this new one took about 7 hours. When it finished everything seemed to work. However, the third or fourth time I hit export, the problem occurred again and the export window stopped appearing.

As it was already a working day, I contacted Adobe's specialized technical service again and a Lightroom specialist agent connected remotely to my computer. We did some checks and concluded (also) that the catalog had been corrupted. As I make a weekly backup of this, we took the copy from last week and did some checks. Everything worked fine with this catalog from a week earlier.

The conclusion was to try to recover my last catalog from this one. The progress I had made in that week would be exported as a catalog and incorporated into this old catalog, to update it to how my current catalog was.

This issue has made me think. Adobe recommends working with a single catalog. However, as my catalog grows, the performance of my Lightroom is getting worse, slower and heavier. Of course, there are 280,000 photos, most of them 42mpx. While I was testing with the Adobe agent, we created a new catalog with about 100 photos and Lightroom worked like a charm.

Is it okay to have such large catalogs? Does it really not affect the performance of our computer? Before the catalog was corrupted, Lightroom left my computer completely dead. And I don't have a bad computer: Core 9 ultra, 64gb ram, Nvidia GForce 4070, photos and catalog on SSD drives... It's just a thought, but... What do you think?

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Seven hours for a catalog import is way too long, so I'm not surprised that unfortunatetly that did not remove the corruption. It often does, but there are no guarantees that it always works. It's OK to have such a big catalog. There are photographers who have catalogs with millions of images. Obviously some things are faster with a very small catalog. Making a catalog backup is much faster. When you start Lightroom Classic, the time it takes to update smart collections is faster. But once Lightroom Classic has finished a few initial tasks, there should not be a significant difference anymore.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

In this case, even Adobe's own specialized consultant suggested me to work with a smaller catalog by remotely seeing on my screen the difference in performance between my usual catalog and the new catalog created with 100 random photos. It was contradictory to Adobe's guidelines.

My concern now is whether the backup from which I am going to recover is potentially corruptible or this has absolutely nothing to do with it. Since this backup was already slow. My lightroom, in general, from the last few years until now, has been very slow.

Ian Lyons

Community Expert

Have you tried moving the LrC window to check that the Export dialog isn't hidden behind it?

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

Yes, it is the first thing I tried because it was the first thing the ADOBE agent suggested to me. The export dialog box is not hidden anywhere, it simply does not appear and if it does appear, it is with a very long delay. In one of the texts above I mention that when I select the option to optimize the catalog and confirm the optimization, all the export boxes that were pending appear.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

That sounds like catalog corruption. What often helps is the following procedure:

1: Create a brand new catalog

2: Run Lightroom with that new catalog and then choose 'File > Import from Another Catalog'

3: Select your old catalog to import. In the dialog, select to import all images but do not move them

When this is done, try if this new catalog can export. If it works, then this is your new main catalog and you can trash the old one. Everything should come across in this procedure, except any publishing services you may have. You'll have to recreate those. If you synced your old catalog to the cloud, then you will need to enable sync on the new catalog. There are some reports that this can create some problems, so you may have to simply remove everything from the cloud and then sync the images again from the new catalog.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

Sorry for the repetition of messages. For some reason Adobe marked me as spam and none of my replies appeared, so I tried several times. Now they all appeared at once.

dj_paige

Legend

@JohanElzenga's comment reminds me that in my bazillion years of using Windows, every couple of years I find myself in the bizarre situation where it appears that some window that I am trying to open actually does open and is beyond the physical boundary of the screen, so I can't see it. Sounds strange. But apparently I am not the only person who has experienced this.

Here are some ideas on how to handle this if that is the problem:

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/how-to-move-a-window-thats-off-the-screen-on-windows-11

https://support.3dsystems.com/s/article/How-to-Bring-Back-Off-screen-Windows?language=en_US

https://www.howtogeek.com/310/bring-misplaced-off-screen-windows-back-to-your-desktop-keyboard-trick/

https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Dialog-window-does-not-display-in-AutoCAD-and-the-program-appears-to-freeze.html#:~:text=Hold%20down%20the%20WINDOWS%20%2B%20SHIFT,move%20the%20window%20into%20view

Also alt-space and then press M will maximize the window or dialog box, I assume it will maximize it in the visible part of the screen, but I can't test that.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Yeah, strange things do happen sometimes. In case of the secondary screen the solution is simple. Before exporting simply disable the Lightroom secondary screen. When the export dialog does indeed appear on the second screen, move it to the main screen. This should normally 'stick', so the problem is solved.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

Thanks for your reply @JohanElzenga . As I was saying, this is not my case and I even tried Adobe's online help which suggested the same thing. I have tried working only with my laptop monitor and nothing appears there. This is really frustrating as I have my entire workflow completely stopped. Until Friday Thursday everything was working normally in my Lightroom and I never had this proble

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

I have a new update on this problem.
Since I have tried so many things, one of them has been the optimization of the catalog. I see that when I run this option and the optimization is about to start, all the pending export windows appear. That is, if before trying to optimize the catalog I have tried to open the export window 7 times, these 7 windows appear at once.

I have observed this on both occasions when I have optimized the catalog. However, once it is optimized and Lightroom closes, I open it again and the problem persists. However, on this second occasion the export window is appearing but after several minutes. It is all very strange.

I would like to tell you that once I get the export window to open, it works great and I have no problems. The problem is opening it.

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

I have a new update on this problem.

Since I have tried so many things, one of them has been the optimization of the catalog. I see that when I run this option and the optimization is about to start, all the pending export windows appear. That is, if before trying to optimize the catalog I have tried to open the export window 7 times, these 7 windows appear at once.

I have observed this on both occasions when I have optimized the catalog. However, once it is optimized and Lightroom closes, I open it again and the problem persists. However, on this second occasion the export window is appearing but after several minutes. It is all very strange.

I would like to tell you that once I get the export window to open, it works great and I have no problems. The problem is opening it.

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

I have a new update on this problem.
Since I have tried so many things, one of them has been the optimization of the catalog. I see that when I run this option and the optimization is about to start, all the pending export windows appear. That is, if before trying to optimize the catalog I have tried to open the export window 7 times, these 7 windows appear at once.

I have observed this on both occasions when I have optimized the catalog. However, once it is optimized and Lightroom closes, I open it again and the problem persists. However, on this second occasion the export window is appearing but after several minutes. It is all very strange.

I would like to tell you that once I get the export window to open, it works great and I have no problems. The problem is opening it.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Do you use a secondary screen? I noticed that dialog boxes sometimes appear behind the secondary screen, so it seems like the dialog does not come up at all.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

Yes, I use two monitors, the one on my laptop and an external 24" Benq monitor for editing. I really only use Lightroom on the Benq monitor and the one on the laptop I use for Chrome and other things. I've tried unmuteing the external monitor but that doesn't seem to be the solution. The export window still doesn't appear when it should.

J

juancalagaresAuthor

Inspiring

I have a new update on this problem.Since I have tried so many things, one of them has been the optimization of the catalog. I see that when I run this option and the optimization is about to start, all the pending export windows appear. That is, if before trying to optimize the catalog I have tried to open the export window 7 times, these 7 windows appear at once.

I have observed this on both occasions when I have optimized the catalog. However, once it is optimized and Lightroom closes, I open it again and the problem persists. However, on this second occasion the export window is appearing but after several minutes. It is all very strange.

I would like to tell you that once I get the export window to open, it works great and I have no problems. The problem is opening it.

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