Stuck in Catalog Upgrade - LR CC classic

[rameshsar]

Hi

I have a imac 2011 running on EL Capitan. Succesfully downloaded and opened the application. However it is now in "Catalog upgrade in progress" stage for the last 90 mts, without the progress bar moving.

What needs to be done now?

[Seahorse]

Help - is there a way to go back to the previous version?

[davidandkara_com]

So, any suggestions for those of us whose upgrades are not moving at all? Is it a bug related to catalog size? Mine has been running all day, and is not accomplishing anything. The Activity Monitor on my iMac is showing that Lightroom is basically doing nothing During the “upgrade.“

[S. Michael Edwards]

My Activity Monitor was showing the same during the first part of upgrading. My catalog is at 44.88GB. When Activity Monitor showed around 90GB written and read is when the progress window changed and is now showing optimizing catalog but now my CPU usage is staying around 90%. Optimizing the catalog always takes forever too. I’ve been sitting here for 3 hours as of now...

[Seahorse]

Michael, how long have you been waiting total?

[S. Michael Edwards]

As I was typing out a response, Lightroom loaded up. I was updating for exactly 4 hours.

[Seahorse]

Thanks Michael. 4 hours would have been acceptable. I have restarted the upgrade process again. I am hoping that it will be complete by tomorrow morning.

[S. Michael Edwards]

You’re welcome! One thing I did was watch the new catalog grow in file size during the upgrade since the progression bar made me question if Lightroom was hung up. The new catalog came out to 1GB bigger than the old catalog. I’m thoroughly surprised how quick Lightroom is now even after battering an image with the heal tool and brushes. Best of luck!

[Seahorse]

OK Folks - Success. It took 14 and a half hours to upgrade my catalog. The good news is it finished and Classic is up and running.

[naturewood2002]

That is good to know! Mine is at hour 13 and still not done. I would have to say had I known it would take this long I would absolutely not have done it when I was in the middle of completing some of my wedding projects...that were due today. Lesson learned. I just hope it finishes soon!

[SeanMcCormack]

The only real issue with big catalogs is they take a huge amount of time because everything is being written to make reading the catalog faster. (I'm speaking generally here of course-there can be issues for sure)

If you a stupendously big catalog, you can clear the photo history. This doesn't remove the edits, just the steps. It makes your catalog smaller.

Duplicate the LR6 catalog. Go to All Photographs. Select all. Go to Develop. from the Develop Menu, select Clear History. In the dialog that appears, choose 'Selected Photos'.

Disclaimer: This will delete your history. Don't do it if you want to retain your history.

You will now have a smaller catalog to upgrade.

[chrisl25866459]

I had exactly the same issue and my catalog was relatively small (~600MB...30k photos)...I tried multiple times to upgrade but it just hung after 5 minutes, and I even left it running overnight but it didn't progress at all.

I fixed it by starting Lightroom Classic with a new catalog, then importing my old catalog from a backup made a couple of days ago (Lightroom is set to backup up my catalog to my Dropbox folder once a day) - the original old catalog would only import a few hundred photos which probably explains why the original upgrade was failing, so maybe there was some data corruption or inconsistency in the catalog structure.

Huge sigh of relief when the import completed and all my folders/collections were visible again in Lightroom...I'm only an amateur photographer so don't rely on Lightroom for income, so I can only imagine how some of the pro's are feeling if they've lost their work

Cheers,

Chris

[Pixelpaddler]

My upgrade to LR Classic now appears to have completed successfully. This is a pleasant surprise after it appeared to hang up with the splash screen showing, "Reading preferences..." for over six hours after advising that the catalog needed to be upgraded. Because LR appeared to be using between 3% and 9% of CPU, I quit the app although Force Quit was required. Today, after restarting my Early 2008 Mac Pro running El Capitan 10.11.7 with "gobs" of RAM and available storage, I found new catalog files for LR. When I started LR Classic, the catalog loaded, all 48K photos are recognized and things, so far, are working.

I cannot tell whether the catalog upgrade operation had frozen the splash screen. I could not tell by looking at LR Classic whether any progress was happening. Because the apparent freeze occurred right after the "need to upgrade your catalog" message, I could not tell if the cataloging process was the culprit or somehow it had frozen elsewhere in "reading preferences." In other words, the process was less than transparent to the user. At least in the end, it now appears to be working.

I'm eager to fully test out the improvements noted in the promo material about LR Classic. Performance improvement would be a huge benefit appreciated very much by those who stare at the screens during transitions between Library and Develop.

[adventure_photo]

I am having the exact same issue and it is frustrating. I have tried upgrading my Lightroom CC(2015) catalog for three days now. I killed it a couple times and tried it over. I've tried on the original as well as a copy. I have even tried creating a new catalog in Lightroom CC Classic and importing from my old catalog to no avail. Please help. I too have a large catalog 27 GB with 425,000 images in it. Thanks for any insights. iMac 2011 i7 3.4 Ghz 32 GB RAM running latest MacOS High Sierra.

[adventure_photo]

Just a follow up for those experiencing this same problem. I finally was able to upgrade my catalog. As others have stated, just stick with it and let it run for hours. My upgrade took 18-20 hours with a 27 GB sized catalog. During that time, it appeared nothing was happening which is why I force quit it several times. Not sure why it's taking so long, but it did eventually work and everything now seems fine. New catalog is about 12 GB so it definitely cleaned up the bloated old one. Anyway, hope that may help others as I almost began pulling hair out trying to upgrade, haha!

[JTobiason_]

Thanks. It's good to know that at this point, my best friend is patience.  Time to clean the garage I guess.

[AviMathur]

There should not be any problem with the machine specs you have.

We are very sorry to head this.

Please verify that you have free disk space available over twice the size of the catalog you wish to upgrade. As we copy the original catalog first and then upgrade it.

Also if your catalog is on an external drive, I would recommend you to move it to an internal disk preferably SSD and try to upgrade.

Thanks,

Akshay

[Craigoe]

Thanks for your suggestions. On monday night i had tried to upgrade my catalogue again and again so i was on lrcat5! lightroom kept running he process saying it was fine then on reopening saying catalogues met with unexpected errors. my external drive was a 256gb ssd with nothing on but the catalogue which was 1.7gb before upgrade. Plenty of room on mac hard drive too. I moved the catalogue to the mac and the problem occured again. As a las resort i got a lr catalogue backup, unzipped onto the mac, not the ssd, and it worked or at least it still is working. I have shut down and restarted have edited and exported and edited with a plugin.  I lost a bit of work but nothing too important. I did however just do his myself while waiting for you guys to come up with ways to help. I still also have no idea why this happened and and have recieved no explanations either. I have not yet reformatted my external ssd and transfered my catalogue onto it. Cccloner and mac disk utilities show no errors on the ssd. The catalogue was running fine before upgrade as was the mac. I, in the meantime effortlessly used stand alone non catalogue based editing programs while my lr was down. dxo optics pro 11 being especially quick and smooth. The uncertain path taken by adobe splitting the cloud and desktop is more than a little worrying and i am questioning the mounting cost of the system. This low confidence was further dented by this upgrading fiasco. Thanks though to you and your team for trying to help while under fire from people like me who were stuck. Craig

[roberte31191476]

I too have DXO Optics Pro.  Perhaps it's time to change completely.  I'm going on 24 hours of "Catalog Upgrade in Progress" with a relatively small catalog, 4.18gb's.  And why are there two different LR's?  It's not for our benefit, I'm sure.  

[Sydney images]

Same issue here. Pretty scary, as I need my LR back up and running today. Kicking myself for doing this upgrade...

9.32 GB Catalogue. 135000 RAW images. Has been stuck on 1.79 GB for over an hour. Already forced quit once, but will leave this going for as long as I can bear it, on the news of others who got through it finally.

Late 2015 iMac 4GHz i7, 24 GB RAM.

[Sydney images]

So, it just suddenly changed to "Optimising Catalogue". Progress! The updated catalogue is 9.35 GB, so a bit larger than the old one.

At least I know it's not frozen, and something is happening. I expect the optimisation will take a while, but I'm a bit less stressed now!

[Sydney images]

Done! all of a sudden it's over. All working and noticeably faster. Thank f**k! About 4 hours all up. Now to do my other catalogues.... Luckily they're a bit smaller.

Good luck and good night.

[Craigoe]

I have upgraded but now the program crashes every few mins, just disappears and will not reopen as it claims another program is using catalogue. (crashed LR classic not letting go of catalogue) I have to restart my mac only for this to happen again. Reinstalled my backup catalogue, upgraded and now I am stock paying for a program that will not let me use my images and I cannot go back. Please release a roll back program so I can leave you company for somebody who tests their software out before ruining peoples businesses!

[SeanMcCormack]

You probably have a .lock file active which needs to be deleted @Craigoe. It's in the folder with your Lightroom Catalog.

[Craigoe]

Hi Thanks for the suggestion. I deleated it and it still crashes without warning. Then the folder lightroom cannot be viewed unless I eject my drive and plug it back in. When I do that the LOCk file is back I have repeated this many times. I even left the program sitting still in the background and it still crashed. My catalogue is now a fraction of its size before.

Also after crash I cannot open the catalogue as it says unexpected error! Removing LOCK files make no difference. Also few mins after LR has crashed and showing no sign of running I get a message saying LR has quit! catalogue on my ex drive is locked for use? How do I get back to before upgrade for my catalogue and LR Im not interested in new version anymore just want to view and send files! you have me at ransom and I dont like it seriously going elswhere even after all these years with you.

Can I uninstall and try again? My catalogue has been upgraded so I have no old version to go to unless I unzipp a back up file to maybe a new location? I need a solution as I cannot use my program at all! Im on Mac high sierra. Help please

Craig

[SeanMcCormack]

The upgrade process does reduce the size of the catalog. While your original catalog has been updated, it's should still be at it's original location-probably in the same place as the upgraded one. You could try to upgrade it again in case something happened the first time.