The Export dialog box doesn't appear

[juancalagares]

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.

[JohanElzenga]

Make sure you do this properly. Exporting as catalog shouldn't take very long, provided that you do not include the negatives (including them means all images get copied into the new catalog folder!!!!) and do not build previews on export. I just tested exporting 200,000 images as a new catalog, and it took just a few minutes.

[DigiAlex]

Thank you for your answer. I didn't import the negatives, but unfortunately I left the previews clicked, but I can't cancel it for now. But if I have to do it again and also with the 2nd half I will remember that. Many thanks for the tip.

[Browneye1967]

But why does the catalog randomly corrupt itself? Surely that is a bug if the program does that randomly.

[JohanElzenga]

There can be several reasons why a catalog becomes corrupted, and not all reasons are necessarily bugs in Lightroom. Hardware problems is one of those reasons, for example. Catalog corruption is not very common. Most Lightroom users never experience it, but those people do not come here to tell you all about that.

[juancalagares]

Hello!

In my case I assumed that it was because the catalog was corrupt. The only thing that solved the problem out of everything I tried was using one of the backups I had.

This made me quite distrustful of Lightroom because I had been experiencing some unbearable slowdowns for some time.