Lightroom rebuilding? SOS!

[catsprite]

I am hoping someone knows what happened to me and how to fix it.

I launched LR to download photos off my iPhone -- as usual, about once a week -- and at first it showed EVERY photo on my phone, most newer ones in duplicate. Bizarre. Undaunted, I chose the ones I felt certain I had not yet downloaded, singles only of course, and tried to add selected. I got a dialog box stating a "fatal databse error" and a list of the photos it was choking on. Hmm, I thought, that's not good.

I quit LR and relaunched. Seemed normal so I tried again. Same result -- as if none of the photos had ever been downloaded (meaning none were grayed out), still duplicates, and this time I just tried the first four... same result.

I quit out of LR. I restarted my Mac. I again launched LR and this time it's worse. It seems it does not know I have ever launched it. I browsed to a folder I thought would be correct, Lightroom Library.lrlibrary... the app said it was "rebuilding" and it could take a while. Another dialog appeared above it and asked if I wanted to resume this rebuilding on next launch. I said yes, only because I cou;dn't see the progress bar it was blocking. It's been two hours and it is at 33%.  I quit again.

Sorry to go long, just trying to offer more details to hopefully help someone answer... anyone? Please?

Thanks so much.

[Jao vdL]

The simplest way to do this is to not connect your phone but simply install Lightroom on it and connect it to the same account as you are using on the desktop. Than when you open Lightroom on your phone, new images get added to Lightroom automatically (there is a preference to control this in the app), uploaded to the cloud and they show up on your desktop Lightroom. Added benefit of installing Lightroom on your phone is that you can shoot raw files in the app in dng format. This works superbly.

I have no clue what happened above though, just thought I'd mention there is a way that does not require you to physically connect the phone and that in my experience works very reliably.

[catsprite]

Thank you, I'll try this, but not sure how to access the 1800+ photos I have downloaded, most of which I have deleted from other devices. They seem to be in the desktop app but it just spins and spins now, nothing loads.