How to open Lightroom without a catalog

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
December 26, 2017
4 replies
4924 views

Please HELP!!

I have 15,000 pictures broken up into collections ready to edit for four weddings. Today I deleted an old catalog that I no longer need from my desktop. While it was deleting I tried to open LR to get started on edits. LR tried to open with the catalog that I was deleting. Now that's all it will do instead of opening how I left it with my RAWs and collections. How do I get LR to just open how I left it and not with this collection? Thank you for any and all advice!!

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M

MelissaLA88

Participating Frequently

I recreated your situation and took two screenshots. Fear not! As stated above, simply click on "Choose a Different Catalog".

After that, you have some options to choose from. A list of recent catalogs will come up that you can choose from. You can also choose a different already existing catalog or simply create a new one! I hope that helps (ignore the black boxes I had to put on the screenshot in order to protect client privacy)

whitefox13

Known Participant

Select the "Choose a Different Catalog" button, LR will open the Finder or Explorer on screen, navigate to the catalog containing your images and select it. LR will open that catalog.

JP Hess

Inspiring

In short, you cannot open Lightroom without a catalog because the only file Lightroom opens IS a catalog. The images that you see in Lightroom are objects in a Lightroom catalog, which is a SQL database.