Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and My Weekend of Aggravation

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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).

So what was the deal? I started up Lightroom only to have nothing appear. Thats right nothing, yet my computer (Apple G5 Quad with 4GB RAM running 10.4.x and Lightroom 1.3.1) showed that it was running. I tried looking online for all kinds of information describing this problem and ended up pushing forward with a much delayed upgrade to OS X 10.5 and Lightroom 1.4.1.

After backing up my internal drives and completing the upgrades I started up my computer only to experience the same weird behavior. Only this time the program was indeed running, just with no windows open. None of my catalogs (original or backup) could be opened via File > Open. In fact when doing so I received the following error “Error on Mac: An error occurred when attempting to change modules.”

I searched online with limited results but eventually found this thread of discussion aptly titled “Error on Mac: An error occurred when attempting to change modules.” Nothing worked until I brought over my last backed up catalog from another drive. The application still would not open it via File > Open, but being on an Apple computer I was able to drag the catalog to the application icon and it opened finally. Once open, per the support thread noted above, I went to “File > Catalog Settings > Relaunch and Optimize”. This seemed to do the trick once I got my catalog open. The challenge was getting it open in the first place. Such a pain in the ass.

Only after I got Lightroom up and running and ranting on Twitter did I learn that others were also having this problem. Seeing as how nothing changed on my computer when this first started and continued to be a problem even after my upgrades I’m wondering what could have caused the problem. Watching Raoul’s video I noticed something we have in common. We’re both using mirrored drives. I also noticed in the support thread that I found that many Apple computer users were experiencing similar problems while using external FW800 drives. I myself am using two external FW800 drives. My primary catalog is stored on my un-mirrored non-FW internal drive so I have no idea what the cause is. It is possible that I had a problem at some point and had to hard shut down the computer or the drives and perhaps that contributed to the problem. Either way I hope that Adobe is able to put out a fix and/or if you happen to experience this problem (or one that is similar) my experience helps you save a few hours of aggravation.

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Posted by Jim on 05.11.2008 at 12:01 pm
Tagged: Software, Technology , Lightroom, Photoshop

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Jim

@Raoul I can see how one might predict disaster with the model Adobe has chosen, but I don't think that is likely. Adobe does have a decent backup system. Although very aggravated with my recent experience it is the only significant problem I've run into. To be honest if they had an alert informing me of the problem rather than loading the app with nothing opening I'd have saved a considerable amount of time. The lack of feedback from the application was very frustrating and difficulty in finding out how to resolve the issue didn't help. I'll still be chugging along with Lightroom. It is too feature rich not to use. Hopefully they'll work out the possible drive issue if it is indeed an issue.

@Nelcha I've never had an issue with external drives before this whether FW400, FW800 or USB 2.0. I'm at a loss why all of a sudden it became an issue. I've been using FW800 drives for over a year with out issue.

Nelcha

Thanks for the heads-up Jim. I am just beginning to use LR 1.4 on my MBP 17" 4GB RAM and had no problem opening RAWs on my laptop, but have not tried to access the ones on my FW extHDs yet. Between you and now Raoul's response I am wondering if I should continue with LR. Does this happen with FW400 also?

Raoul

All these problems are starting to prove Dan Heller right. He said Lightroom was a disaster waiting to happen. If it didn't make my workflow so much more efficient, I would dump it in favor of Bridge. But I've used Bridge and and it's just not as good as Lightroom when it comes to the interface, features, and ways of organizing the photos.