The problems I blogged about last week with my Lightroom library were mostly—but not completely—fixed by rebuilding my preview database. My library of around 2800 images was useable, but there were still some irritating things happening that hadn’t been cleared up. Finding myself tired of mystery issues while editing photos on the transatlantic flight home, I decided to pull the trigger and do a complete database rebuild.
There were two ways that I considered rebuilding my database. The first was to create a new database and do an “Import” from the old database. I strongly thought about this option first, but I was a bit worried that if the source of my issues was problem data in the database that I’d simply migrate the problem. So I decided to go with plan B and lean on the XMP metadata that I’ve had Lightroom write for each of my images. I’ve long checked the “Automatically write changes into XMP” setting for Lightroom catalogs in part to provide a recovery mechanism in case of database failure and it seemed like as good a time as any to put theory into practice.
So, I created a new catalog on a separate disk drive and then pointed Lightroom’s import dialog box at my existing image tree and had it copy and import all the image files it could find. As you might expect, this wasn’t a quick process. In fact, I think I watched a big chunk of Spiderman 3 on the overhead monitors as Lightroom churned away. But when it was all over, I had my images in a brand new library, but with all their existing metadata and develop settings in place. I was even pleasantly surprised to find that my snapshots came across in the XMP metadata. The only thing I lost in the rebuild was the history of development edit steps for each image. Since I had the snapshots and the final developed results, however, I was pretty happy.
Time will tell if this takes care of the issues I’ve been seeing. I’m back in the US now and have a wider arsenal of options to take additional steps if need be—including setting things up on a totally different machine. But so far, things seem to be OK. And that’s a good thing as going through a photo library is a perfect thing to do when jet lag is keeping one awake at 4AM.
For the record—and the sake of completeness—I just updated my main Lightroom library on my home machine to 1.2 with 20,000 photographs in the database. Things are running smoothly and I'm quite happy about it, FTW.
For sometime now I'm having serious problems with my database, sometimes when I start developing the program resets to the default slider position immediately after I dragged it or it throws up a SQL error saying it cannot select or do other stuff on the database.
I'm not sure what the cause is, but I find it pretty annoying. I've been having these issues since version 1.0.
I don't think it's a function of library image size. I've got a catalog on my home machine that's 10x the size and it runs OK. I think the problem I experienced was just something in the database getting hosed and it would have had the same effect with 200 images or 20,000.
That said, I see several people using multiple catalogs to keep their total collection size to under 5000, which is definitly a very low number. I too will come home from a shoot with 2000 shots at a time.
Sorry, didn't mean to be anonymous below, hit the button too quick.
This is the problem - that a library of 2800 images is causing enough of a problem to justify the long and boring process of rebuilding. I'm a wedding photographer and I regularly come home with 2000 shots from a single shoot and I certaibly find that LR can be agonisingly slow from 1000 upwards. Far slower than C1, in fact. I stick with it because I find the develop module to be far more intuitive and, paradoxically, quicker to use in many situations but I really feel that Adobe are going to need to show some serious improvements in how the software handles itself when confronted with a (not very) big catalogue in future upgrades - and until they make that leap they certainly shouldn't be looking for payment. Don't get me wrong - I love the application, but it moves at a glacial pace at times when it should be flying (an hour to export 200 JPEGS is soooooo 20th century!).
What about your virtual copies. They don't survive this kind of migration, do they? And collections..?