I was working in Lightroom 2.5 (iMac) the other day when the power to the house flicked off and then on. The iMac shut down. When I booted it back up and tried to open Lightroom an error message indicated that my one and only catalog file was corrupt and could not be opened. It directed me to Adobe.com and a procedure.
The procedure had me create a new folder, move my corrupt file into it and the matching db file too. I was then to find a last backup catalog file and load it in the appropriate folder. I did all this and then opened Lightroom. Then a whole series of images (180+) could not be found. When I tried searching for them, I could only recover about half of them. When I tried searching the iMac's HD for the missing files, using Mac's Finder, I could not find the missing image files. The same thing happened when I searched my backup external HD, which was on and connected to the iMac when the power went out.
I'm not sure where to go from here.
So after all my rambling, here are me questions:
1. How many separate catalogs files can Lightroom maintain?
2. How could a back up catalog file become corrupted by a power failure when I was working of the iMac's HD?
3. I guess the images are gone forever.
If anyone has any ideas, you can reach me at
edward@amindseye.com.
Thanks, Edward