Help with Lightroom? - I have really mucked it up

Kerioak

Kerioak

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Name
Christine
Edit My Images
Yes
I appear to have killed Lightroom on my computer!

I was trying to back up some files to an external hard drive, and then recategorised some of the others on that drive that are listed in LR into years - it promptly announced:

?:0: attempt to index field 'rootFolder' (a nil value)

I have tried repairing, reinstalling, deleting, installing, installing onto external drive but I cannot get past this message when I try and do anything once it is open - no access to Library etc.

Help???
 
Can't help personally I'm afraid... but I've found the adobe forums quite helpful in the past. Searching for your problem threw up THIS thread. I haven't read the responses but hope it might be some help...
 
The painful but best way to get this done is to use regedit . Not for beginners though. Simply type regedit into your run box, and using Ctrl F u will need to search for all the strings containing Adobe, pick out the lightroom ones and delete them, and the same for a pure lightroom search.

After that, delete the folder on your hard drive and reinstall. Not sure how many strings lightroom enters, but most adobe stuff uses a lot and it could be a lengthy process.

Hope this helps.
 
Hi,
Have you tried a system resore?
That might take to computer back to a time when Lightroom was OK
John
 
It may simply be that the database has got corupted. You do back it up don't you???

Try deleting the preference files, this will force LR to ask what catalogue you want to use, select your latest backup and see if it starts from there. OK you'll have to reimort everything since that back up, but it saves having to reimport everything.

Just off to back mine up.............

Or on a PC hold down the ctrl key when you start LR this the gives you the option to change catalogues. Don't know the short cut for this on the Mac, I've been trying to find out without any sucess

OK found it on Mac Hold down cmd+alt when you launch to change catalogues at launch
 
It seems that some files may have got corrupted when I was backing up. I can get them all in up to about a month ago but have to reload the whole lot (a few years) each time I start LR which is not on.

Tried system restore but it had its usual effect - absolutely useless - in fact it was unable to restore to a previous point - tried a few.

I have tried the remedies suggested on the Adobe site without much success. Have been at this since about 2pm and am now fed up with it and will try again tomorrow.

Thanks for your suggestions though and I will start from scratch again when I am fresh.
 
If you get LR to show the catalog selection panel when it starts (holding down CTRL) there's an option to test the catalog, worth a spin as it will attempt to repair any problems (y)
 
To anyone else that has this problem, getting rid of the error message is easy following the instructions in the links above. The problem is getting all the images, complete with keywords, grading, colours etc back into LR without having to redo hours/days/weeks of work sorting them all out.

So far the most successful seems to be to import an early catalogue backup, then the next most recent and keep doing this until you get as close as you can to the current date. Starting at the most recent does not import all pictures, especially the most recent (up to a month) and says they are corrupted but doing it a bit at a time and incrementally seems to work.

All I have "lost" now as far as can see is the sub categories of one of my collections which will not take too long to sort out.

Tip: Do not delete all previous back-ups of your LR Catalogue. From this experience I would advise keeping at least one from each month if you must delete some for extra space, more if you store many thousands of images each month.

In a way I have been lucky as I am still in the process of importing all my past images into LR and keywording them from when I purchased LR 2, if I had had them all imported already I could have been doing this for days instead of a few hours once I worked out what might be successful.
 
I've not had any problems with db/catalog errors (touch wood) and I think part of the reason why is because I keep lots of small catalogs rather than one large one. I separate them into type of work (commercial, portrait, etc) and some special jobs (weddings for example)/clients have their own one as well.

I also backup to catalogs by selecting the files and exporting them as a new catalog to a folder on the backup drive but this is done for the month so I end up with backups of each month as a complete catalog. Getting LR to generate a new catalog for the files should help minimize any errors that might exist in the larger db.
 
This is the first time I have had a problem with it and have been using it since the first Beta came out (and the programme it replaced which I was using before)

Does that mean you have to reimport them every time you change from, for instance - commercial to weddings?

Each time I import a newly taken set of photographs they do into a dated file and then I add a description to this and keyword and grade/colour them, but they all go into the same catalogue (ie all the back up data is saved to the same back up file.)

I have a series of collections and the only thing I seem to have lost was all the sub-collections (cannot remember what they were called) in my Bird collection - I had them for each species of bird
 
I have LR set to ask which catalog when I run it so I just choose the catalog I want to use, no re-importing needed. You can have as many catalogs as you like and the smaller the catalog the faster LR will run (y)
 
Try it and see but I think it works although collections/search/etc won't find images across multiple catalogs.
 
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