How do you handle a corrupted previews catalog in Adobe Lightroom? How do you identify the problem and solve it? I will show you exactly how to do it in this short screencast.
Click on the screenshot below to view or download the video. It’s 720p HD (1280×720 pixels). I messed up (slightly) in the video by calling “striping” RAID 1 instead of RAID 0. I corrected myself shortly thereafter, but I don’t want to confuse you. So, for the record, it seems working in Lightroom on RAID 0 (striped) drives tends to corrupt the previews database and lead to these sorts of errors, and I think it has to do with the I/O load on the drives. The RAID controller can’t keep up and will skip a few bits here and there.
Updated 5/25/08: Looks like what I said before (and in the video below) is incorrect. It’s not RAID or the drive that’s at fault here. It looks like Lightroom itself is to blame. It’s an unstable piece of crap, and when you have about 40,000 photos or more in a single catalog, the previews database will get corrupted no matter where it’s stored and how it’s accessed, and then Lightroom will keep crashing like a drunken yuppie. Even though I switched my catalog over to the Drobo, and ran it off there, it’s now crashing once more. Damn Adobe and their pathetic software development.
Related Posts
Subscribe to Raoul Pop today for free.


Save it
Stumble it
Digg it
Twitter it

[...] a short screencast, Raoul Pop describes troubleshooting a corrupt Adobe Lightroom previews catalog. Raoul concludes that Lightroom has issues writing its previews catalog file to a drive that is [...]
Pingback — May 11, 2008 @ 2:30 pm
[...] For some strange reason I started to experience really odd behavior with Adobe Lightroom this weekend. In the end I burned a good portion of my weekend dealing with reviving Lightroom rather than working on my photographs. This made me a very unhappy camper as I’ve been short on time to catch up on post-processing. How far this will set me back I have no idea, but its not going to be a short amount of time as my schedule is growing increasingly busy. What I’ve since learned is that I was not alone in dealing with this dilemma over the weekend. I’ve since read up that Dawn Armfield and Raoul Pop experienced problems recently. Raoul ended up putting out a video detailing how to fix his specific problem (Dealing with a corrupted previews catalog in Lightroom). [...]
Pingback — May 11, 2008 @ 3:01 pm
[...] may recall I initially moved my photo libraries to one of the Drobos because I kept experiencing Lightroom library corruption and thought the WD Studio drive was at fault. As it turns out, Lightroom itself is to blame. Once [...]
Pingback — July 2, 2008 @ 9:02 pm