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Archive 2014 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice

  
 
thebeginning
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p.1 #1 · p.1 #1 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


With what seems to be a terrible stroke of bad luck (mixed with lessons learned), my LR 4 catalog is corrupted and completely unopenable. And no, I don't make backups nearly often enough.

I tried all the typical fixes (tweaking permissions, trying to copy it into another folder, etc), but my power went out while I was rendering previews and the catalog is completely screwed up. I rebooted and now the catalog file is reading as 0 bytes (it was around 3.5Gb before).


Long story short:


A) I'm right in assuming this is a lost cause, no? If not, what are my options?


B) Is there ANY way to import xmps, edits, culling details, etc into Lightroom at all, since I do still have the raw files and previews?


Really kicking myself at this point...



Oct 14, 2014 at 05:26 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #2 · p.1 #2 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


Try deleting your preview file.

I had a LR5 catalogue corruption while I was away on holiday a while back .
I tried to recover using the LR tool to no avail . It didnt help me in the end as I managed to delete the LR cat I was using but an older one was also giving the same issue and it turned out that deleting my previews cured the problem.

If you dont know where the preview file is . its in the same folder as the LRcat file .
you can let LR rebuild the previews if you get things back up and running again




Oct 14, 2014 at 06:12 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #3 · p.1 #3 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


oops I just re read you post . maybe deleing the previews wont help if you've copied the bad cat to a different folder .


If you store XMP files with your RAW files then you would get SOME of your info back . keywords and stuff (history i think) dont get stored in the XMP .

you can easily create another CAT and import your RAW files into that and see what is kept .



Oct 14, 2014 at 06:15 PM
thebeginning
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p.1 #4 · p.1 #4 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


Yep I tried creating a new CAT and imported a recent shoot (that I'd already processed and exported)...nothing was saved, from ratings to edits to anything.


I'm pretty much just using this as a very painful learning experience, but it shouldn't hurt my forward work too much.

I think the fact that my once massive CAT file is now 0kb in size shows that it was very, very corrupted and Windows cleared it out upon rebooting.



Oct 14, 2014 at 06:55 PM
John Caldwell
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p.1 #5 · p.1 #5 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


Sorry about your bad experience.

Writing metadata to RAW files, as a routine, will allow you to recover your Camera RAW edits when you import those RAW files into any new catalog. The LR history is, gone, except the the most recent state of a given file.

So consider not only a proper Catalog backup scheme moving forward, but also employing Write Metadata to files within your LR catalog as a ritual.

John Caldwell



Oct 14, 2014 at 08:16 PM
thebeginning
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p.1 #6 · p.1 #6 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


John Caldwell wrote:
Sorry about your bad experience.

Writing metadata to RAW files, as a routine, will allow you to recover your Camera RAW edits when you import those RAW files into any new catalog. The LR history is, gone, except the the most recent state of a given file.

So consider not only a proper Catalog backup scheme moving forward, but also employing Write Metadata to files within your LR catalog as a ritual.

John Caldwell


Great idea. Where in the preferences is that setting?



Oct 14, 2014 at 11:07 PM
Ian.Dobinson
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p.1 #7 · p.1 #7 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


yeah it does sound like the cat is toast . when mine went bad it still had a size in GB that was correct .

a couple of questions .

when you say the cat file was 3.5gb . is that JUST the LRCAT file ? if so how many images are you talking about?

When you say you don't backup nearly enough . do you have ANY working backups ? I mean a backup that works thats a month old is still better than starting again from scratch .

do you write to XMP files ? if so are these XMP files in the same folder that the images are that you imported ?

going on from here if you have to start from scratch or you can recover an old backup .
set LR to backup on exit or at least make it ask you every time it exits . create a folder on your image drive and have LR backup to that place (by default i think it puts it in the same place as the LRcat file) .
if you need to save space keep only the last month's backups and maybe keep the last backup every month for a few months also .





Oct 15, 2014 at 01:31 AM
thebeginning
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p.1 #8 · p.1 #8 · LR Catalog Corrupt - Need Advice


I can recover a backup from last year, but that's only so helpful.

Writing to XMPs was not checked off (I think by default it's not), so I don't have that option.


To answer the size question, I probably had ~150,000+ raw files imported.



Oct 15, 2014 at 11:33 AM





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