For lots of people, the upgrade to Lightroom 1.2 seems to have gone smoothly. Mikkel describes it as a maintenance upgrade. For me, however, it wasn’t quite as smooth. After upgrading, I’d run into spinning beachballs that required a force quit. I’d also run into images where Lightroom would put up the “Working” notice and never render out the image. And, more than a few times, some images in the develop module were displayed from their thumbnail view and all pixellated.
The first thing I tried to fix things was to reinstall Lightroom. I didn’t expect this would solve anything, but it was the least invasive option I could think of. Unfortunately, even after totally clearing Lightroom off of my system and putting 1.2 on, the problems persisted. This meant that the source of the issues weren’t with Lightroom itself, but with something else. And that something else was likely my catalog. Not a pleasant thought, especially when you are on the road in a hotel room a third of the way around the planet from home.
The next thing I tried was to optimize the library. I didn’t expect that this would help either, but I was still looking for non-invasive options. After letting Lightroom restart and rebuild its database, the problems were still there.
At this point, I was pretty much out of easy ideas. I thought about possibly downgrading to Lightroom 1.1 for the duration of my trip to see if that took care of things, but I was actually quite concerned about taking this step. I didn’t know if the database schema was updated at all for 1.2 and would run correctly with 1.1.
Trying not to panic, I started to really think about what was going on. It seemed to me that the problems that Lightroom was having had something to do with displaying previews that it had built and stashed in its preview database. So, I trashed the preview database for my catalog. When I started up Lightroom, it had to rebuild all the thumbnails but other than that, the results seem to be all positive. The issues with displaying images seem to be gone and things seem to be running quite a bit more smoothly.
Hopefully, your update experience went much more smoothly than mine, but if you run into image display problems you might want to try moving your preview database out of the way and see if that helps things out.
Is anybody experiencing troubles with metadata? It looks like my LR it is incredibly slow as it seems not to understand when it updated the metadata. so if the automatic metadata update is on, it keeps on doing slowing things down a lot. without it, it is not slow, but it does not preserve changes. and if i save metadata manually, it still shows that changes need to be saved on the metadata...
To be able to reinstall Lightroom on the Mac once you have deleted it (or to install a previous copy), it seems you have to delete the installer receipt file in your /Library/Receipts directory on your system drive.
I've had a few different problems (as mentioned on your blog). To fix them I tried uninstalling LR (the release notes say to just delete the Lightroom.app), then reinstall. But, the installer says there's nothing to install. I'm not sure why. In other words, I'm not sure what the installer looks for to determine if LR is already there or not. I emptied my trash, restarted my computer, and I still can't reinstall LR. I'll try moving my presets folders and see of that helps. Hopefully the LR forums are back online.
LR is a huge step in the right direction, but it's clear we still aren't there yet. It is a 1.2 release after all.
Same problem as you regarding the rendering of images...
Hope that a fix appear soon.
Javi
Sean: Good to know!
Simon: Yah. I was very thankful that I've been having Lightroom write the XMP sidecar data. It slows things down a bit, but would have made it somewhat more palatable to build a new catalog from scratch if needed.
FWIW, there is no upgrading of the database between 1.1 and 1.2.
Hi James, I had a similar issue when upgrading to 1.1. All images imported after the upgrade were fine. But older ones all had errors. I tried all the techniques you tried, but it still didn't fix the catalog. In the end I had to create a new catalog and then import my original. Apart from a few preferences which had to be reconfigured, it is now working fine. Now I will be backing up my catalog before I install any updates!