Why do have upgrade catalog??

[gittas9477898]

Hello Adobe community,

When I try to open Lightroom Classic (9.1) I get a message: "We need to upgrade your catalog for use with Lightroom Classic. LC will create a new catalog in the destination indicated below"…. Etc… I can't use LR until I have created a new catalog.
Why do I get the message and have to create a new catalog?

I read so much misery about upgrading, are there any tips, things I should pay attention to?

Cheers Gitta

[AxelMatt]

You get this message if you have started Lightroom 9.1 for the first time after installing the update. 

It's right that you have to update your catalog. But normally all is done automatically and Lightroom create a new catalog and bring it up to the new version. Your "old" catalog will be leave untouched.

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

Why do I get the message and have to create a new catalog?

Because Lightroom 9.1 requires a different internal structure in the catalog, so upgrade is mandatory.

I read so much misery about upgrading, are there any tips, things I should pay attention to?

Upgrading is such a simple process, you click "Upgrade" and walk away, and in a few minutes the upgrade is over. 

[JP Hess]

The updated catalog will be a copy of the old catalog, and will contain all of the work that was in it. It will have the same name but will have a -2 appended to its name. It should all be done automatically and when the upgrade process is complete you should be able to continue working uninterrupted. This process is necessary because the database engine which drives the catalog requires the update.

[HomerHernandez]

After I updated my Mac to Monterey and updated Lightroom Classic none of my old photos will open up. Do you have any suggestions?

[nogfietsen]

Lightroom was just updated to V11. Is it necessary to keep previous versions of the catalog, or can I delete all catalogs and helper files without the -V11 suffix?

[Conrad C]

In theory, you shouldn’t have to keep the old catalogs and their helper files, because all information about your existing images and their edits have been converted to the new catalog format. Of course you shouldn’t delete the previous version catalog until you are confident everything got transferred properly during the upgrade conversion.

If you think there is any chance that you might need to go back to an older version of Lightroom Classic, you can keep the old catalogs. You do not need to keep them in the same folder as the current version of the catalog; you could stash them away in an external archive drive for example.

Whatever you do to the old catalogs, you should do to the helper files. If you keep the old catalogs, keep the helper files; if you delete them, delete the helper files too. Same goes for moving or renaming; do it consistently to the entire set.

[Conrad C]

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@gittas9477898 wrote:

Why do I get the message and have to create a new catalog?

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There are new features like the powerful masking options (which are proving quite popular). The old catalog format doesn’t know how to store them, so an old catalog must be converted to the new format to be able to store new types of editing data that did not exist before.