Issues with Lightroom 3

look in your Time Machine backups for old copies of the catalog files.


BTW, you might want to upgrade to LR 4.

 

It is highly unlikely that it "just disappeared"... it's more likely that Lightroom has lost track of it. This could be because Lr was started up when your 'real' catalogue was off-line. Or because the catalogue was moved. Or simply because you (accidentally) created a new catalogue and Lr will use this new catalogue until it's told to use the old "real" catalogue.

All you have to do is find the old 'real' catalogue and tell Lr to use that one instead. Start with preferences, and navigate to the catalogue preferences. (Sorry, but I'm not at my computer with Lr installed, so this if from memory). Is there anything useful there?

Or... do a spotlight search for lrcat. That should locate all your Lr catalogues. Figure out where your 'real' one is and then just tell Lr to use that one.

Once you have this sorted out.... Do you backup your catalogue? Time Machine should be making a copy. I also have Lr backup the catalogue more or less daily to a separate folder. And then I have my system make a cloned copy of all system files - including the catalogue and the Lr backup catalogue - nightly.

Good Luck. If you run into any problems, post back.

 

When you do a search lrcat, remember to search the external drive as well.

If you had “Automatically write changes into XMP” checked in the catalogue preferences, or regularly wrote out the changes, then Lightroom will save the editing instructions and other metadata to .xmp sidecar files for each raw image. If you are unable to recover the catalogue you can import the photos into a new catalogue and Lightroom can import that info from the sidecars. This won't include the presets, just the preset 'recipe' as applied to the individual photos.

Before doing this or anything that might potentially change the files, I suggest backing the image and sidecar files to another directory or drive.