Is this a reasonable recovery plan for a corrupted catalog situation?

[russellw23208715]

Have experienced a corrupted catalog in Adobe Photoshop LR 2.

Was able to recover a backup catalog but loss all keyword entries.

Input some key words to determine if the catalog would be worth keeping.

Relaunched the catalog and the key words were retained.

Created a new catalog, entered key words and have been able to relaunch this catalog also.

Ideally, I would prefer one catalog with a nice, clean startup capability.

Planning to purchase the latest version of LR.

Hoping to combine the backup catalog & the new catalog into one catalog for use with the new version of LR.

Thus I will be able to retain my metadata and enter key words at my leisure, thus minimizing data loss.

I’m open to recommendations and in particular to the cleanup & prep for the new LR.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Russell Williams, Jr.

[JP Hess]

You created a new catalog and entered keywords. But does the new catalog contain the same images or different images?

[russellw23208715]

The new catalog contains 57 new images.

[dj_paige]

Have experienced a corrupted catalog in Adobe Photoshop LR 2.

Was able to recover a backup catalog but loss all keyword entries.

If you recovered the catalog properly, you'd have all the keywords, they wouldn't be missing. So you did something wrong. Can you tell us the EXACT sequence of steps you used?

[russellw23208715]

I located the catalogbkup on my 2nd external backup drive and established and used this link to replace the default link.

The backup folder, catalogbkup, is as follows with the subfolder, 2009-12-28 1653, that contained the LR data and library.

Catalogbkup

2009-12-28 1653

Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata

Lightroom 2 Catalog.lrcat

Note:- The keyword list is still available and when I added keywords as a test the count for the words were increased as if the entries still applied to the total for a given individual.

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[dj_paige]

Note:-  The keyword list is still available and when I added keywords as a test the count for the words were increased as if the entries still  applied to the total for a given individual.

I guess I don't understand this. So let me ask a question: if in this backup catalog, go to the Library Module and click on a photo and look on the right side in the Keywording Panel, are the keywords there as they existed in the original catalog, or not?

[russellw23208715]

I have checked individual images in several folder and the keywords have vanished. I have performed searches via the Find and text option with zero finds. Should qualify this, the key words reentered for some images, in an attempt to determine functionality of the library, were retrievable.

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[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

So one explanation I can offer is that the backup catalog was created BEFORE you entered the keywords, and the keywords were entered after the last backup and are only in the now-corrupted catalog. Does that seem reasonable?

Another explanation is that after you opened the backup catalog, you imported the photos. Did you do that?

if it's neither of those two, then I can't explain why the keywords are not in the backup catalog.

[russellw23208715]

I too thought this might be the case, however, there still appears to be a disconnect. Keywords for individual images do not exist but the keyword list is populated with keywords and totals for number of times an individual key word has been used.

Given the analysis I believe the optima solution is to use the back up catalog to the latest version of LR. Import the 57 images currently in a separate catalog and eventually update the keyword entries. Thus, I will delete entries in the key word list would like to make the back up catalog the default catalog. Hopefully the transition will be smooth and will create a user friendly work flow.

Would appreciate your advise and recommendations for this implementation.

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[russellw23208715]

Thanks for your help and severing as a sounding board.  After additional analysis, I have decided that the recovered catalog lacks integrity.  files are missing, attempting to import prior images are identified as being in the catalog but are not retrieval and appear as blank images.  Thus I have decided to bite the bullet, delete my current version of LR and purchase a new version and reestablish my libraries.