Dealing with a corrupted previews catalog in Lightroom
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.
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[...] 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
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