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Author Topic: Light room will not open  (Read 1359 times)

w_jones@conknet.com

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Light room will not open
« on: October 11, 2017, 09:46:43 pm »

Hi folks, I have been using lightroom for years now, since the second version and have had no problems with it at all. A couple of days ago I trued to open LR and I got the following error message as shown in the first picture. I tried the repair button and got the second message. Can anyone help me out with this or do I need to set aside a block of time to call Adobe?

Warren
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Tony Jay

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Re: Light room will not open
« Reply #1 on: October 11, 2017, 10:36:36 pm »

A bit of background here:
Lightroom itself is an application.
The catalog is a database that Lightroom relies on for most of its functionality.
Your images are separate again where the catalog holds references to the locations of your images along with other metadata related to each image - this includes editing information.

What has happened is the the catalog (database) has been corrupted.
The application itself is almost certainly fine with no issues.
There are many reasons why a database may become corrupted.
Sometimes the application controlling the database (Lightroom in this case) can repair the problem and sometimes, as in this case, it can't.
However, in this case Lightroom is offering you an option to try and repair the catalog again - I would go for this option initially, there is nothing to lose here...

It is likely however that this catalog is unfixable.

Possible options include going back to catalog backups - these are what Lightroom offers to do when it closes.
So, the question is: have you been allowing Lightroom to make catalog backups and when was the last backup done?
The other possibility depends on whether you have been backing up your catalog  (and images), independent of what Lightroom does, onto different hard drives.
If you have,  then it is simple matter of opening the most recent backup.

Perhaps you have been regularly writing metadata back to file.
In this case although not all the metadata that Lightroom can hold in the database is written back to file nearly all of it is.
And so, if you have to create a new catalog and import all your images from scratch Lightroom will use the metadata to reconstitute the database. This includes things like keywords and all the editing metadata.

However, it is possible, likely perhaps, that you have neither Lightroom-generated catalog backups nor independently-generated catalog backups, nor the foresight to save metadata back to file.
In this instance you will have to chalk this up to experience and start again with a new catalog and import all your images from scratch...

Whatever your situation here I make a strong suggestion that you rapidly learn all there is about Digital Asset Management as it pertains to digital image collections (and there is plenty of good information out there) so that in the future an occurrence such as this is simply an annoyance that can be overcome in a few minutes.

Tony Jay
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pflower

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Re: Light room will not open
« Reply #2 on: October 12, 2017, 05:02:18 am »

The second message suggests that there may be a problem with the disk itself.  If you were on a Mac I would suggest that you check the relevant permissions for the disk and the folder in which the catalog is stored or run something like DiskWarrior.  It looks as though you are on a Windows machine about which I know absolutely nothing, but there may be similar steps you can take.

I had enormous problems  with LR at one point (caused by permissions being changed to read only as opposed to read and write) and found that a call to Adobe Support was extremely helpful.  They walked me through the steps needed to rectify the situation.  So I would call them asap.

Good luck
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Tony Jay

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Re: Light room will not open
« Reply #3 on: October 12, 2017, 06:11:34 am »

The second message suggests that there may be a problem with the disk itself.  If you were on a Mac I would suggest that you check the relevant permissions for the disk and the folder in which the catalog is stored or run something like DiskWarrior.  It looks as though you are on a Windows machine about which I know absolutely nothing, but there may be similar steps you can take.

I had enormous problems  with LR at one point (caused by permissions being changed to read only as opposed to read and write) and found that a call to Adobe Support was extremely helpful.  They walked me through the steps needed to rectify the situation.  So I would call them asap.

Good luck
I am pretty certain that this issue has nothing to do with read/write permissions.
Lightroom would not call a catalog corrupt unless it could access the database file - and clearly if it could not access the database file then Lightroom would tell one that it could not find the database file. In that circumstance Lightroom would have no idea whether the file was corrupt or not...

Tony Jay
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w_jones@conknet.com

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Re: Light room will not open
« Reply #4 on: October 13, 2017, 03:04:32 am »

Well guys, I think I have deeper problems, it is a windows 7 computer BTW. not sure if I have a virus, corrupt HD or other issues. but it seems that other programs have gone awry too. Scanner software, cannot connect to internet etc... sigh If I cannot figure it out I guess I have to start over. I am going to close this topic for now. Thanks for the help.
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