Today’s Question: I have the dreaded “corrupted catalog” message [in Lightroom Classic] and have looked online at how to fix this. I am reluctant to try to fix this issue with so little knowledge of how the catalogs work. I fear causing more issues.
Tim’s Quick Answer: You can generally recover a corrupted catalog using tools built into Lightroom Classic. Failing that, you can recover from a catalog backup.
More Detail: There are two messages you may see if the Lightroom Classic catalog is corrupted. If you are presented with the dialog that includes the “Repair Catalog” button, click that button to see if Lightroom Classic is able to resolve the issue for you.
If you don’t see that button, you can launch Lightroom Classic while holding the Alt key on Windows or the Option key on Macintosh, which will bring up the Select Catalog dialog. Choose the applicable catalog from the list within the dialog and turn on the “Test integrity of this catalog” checkbox at the bottom-right of the list. Then click the Open dialog.
If neither of the above provide a solution, your best option is to recover from a recent catalog backup. By default those backups are stored in a “Backups” folder in the same folder as the catalog files. The backup will be a ZIP file that you can extract the catalog files from. Then open the catalog by double-clicking the file with the .lrcat filename extension.
Another option that may work is to create a new catalog and then use the “Import from Another Catalog” command to import the corrupted catalog into the new catalog.
Worst case, you could simply create a new catalog and import all existing photos using the Add option at the top-center of the Import dialog, making sure that you don’t apply any changes such as a metadata preset or Develop preset during that import. As long as you had previously enabled the option to automatically save metadata to the source files, this would preserve key metadata. However, in this case you would lose Lightroom-specific metadata such as collections, virtual copies, and history.
