2 Replies Latest reply: Feb 2, 2014 2:40 PM by dj_paige RSS

    Corrupt lightroom catalog

    DeePeeBee Community Member

      I am using the latest version of LightroomCC on a desktop running the latest version of Windows 8. My photos and xmp files are on a portable hard drive. I also work on the files using my laptop which uses Windows 7. (Not upgradeable to version 8) While this worked for several months, I started getting messages on both computers that the catalog was corrupt. At first,the problem was solved by running the Lightroom "fix", but that no longer worked. I started all over again with a new download of the original photos and entirely new edits, etc. and the corrupt catalog messages went away, for a month or so, but I have been doing a lot of work on several hundred of the files and the message came back, this time only on the laptop. When I take the portable hd back to the desktop, Lightroom opens fine and loads the catalog. I realized that I had made metadata changes that were not reconciled between the desktop and the laptop, so I went thru the photos in my current working collection to bring them all "up to date". But there are probably other files that are showing a conflict. Would this cause the "corrupt catalog" message to appear?  If so, how can I eliminate the remaining conflicts?  What does "sync metadata do"? How do I avoid creating the conflicts? Thanks for any help.  Dorothy

        • 1. Re: Corrupt lightroom catalog
          ssprengel Community Member

          The metadata being out of sync won’t cause your catalog to become corrupted.  You might be doing something else that is causing that, like rebooting the computer in the middle of when LR is working or having the battery run down or undocking the laptop before shutting down LR, or other things that leave LR’s operations unfinished when the computer is powered off.

           

          You can avoid having metadata conflicts by putting your LR catalog on the external drive along with your photos.  Make sure the drive letter of your external drive is the same for both computers.  I have been doing this for several years, and never had a catalog become corrupted.

           

          How to get things in sync between both sets of images is going to be a manual process, an only as perfect as your memory of which computer the edits were done on most recently.  If you have made half your edits to a photo on one computer and half on another then there’s no good way to reconcile them, other than doing the steps by hand that the other catalog has that this one doesn’t.

          • 2. Re: Corrupt lightroom catalog
            dj_paige Community Member

            Another possible cause of corrupt catalogs would be if the hard disk is starting to fail.

             

            Also, it is a good idea to make backups regularly via Lightroom, because this compresses/optimizes the catalog and there is a test for the integrity of the catalog.