As someone who goes by LRC, aka Henry O. Farad, I wondered which of my collapses you were referring to: physical, emotional or intellectual.

That's really weird.  What about your backup catalogs?  Do they load?

Do the raw files show up in your filesystem?  Are they on the root drive? Or an externally mounted drive? Is there any chance that the drive just accidentally unmounted?

What OS are you running it on?

I thought Lightroom didn't come out until like 2007.

I ran into a problem with my milkyway over mount shasta panorama where it won't upload to flickr. It turns out that after a certain point in my editing the file it makes jumps in size.  Also it bogs down my processor too much. I'm going to try to export it as DNG, and do some touchup on that.  I've got my own litany of gripes with LR, but I haven't found anything that sucks less.

I think it is On1 that claimed it could read LrC catalogs, but when I tried it, there were too many warts, too many things that Lightroom did much, much better.

--
Larry Colen
lrc@red4est.com  sent from ret13est

Rick -

You might try downloading a trial copy of ON1 PhotoRAW 2024.  It's fully
functional for a 30 day trial and can be purchased either as a
subscription or a version that you can use forever.  You can access your
image files by just going to the folder in which they reside - no need
to generate a catalog that is the only access to your files.  You CAN
generate a catalog if you want, but it just makes things a little easier
to find and doesn't limit the program's access to your images like LR does.

-p

On 4/9/2024 11:29 AM, Rick Womer wrote:

Larry,

An update: Things seem to have partially healed from 22 hours of neglect and 4 hours of tedium this evening.

With constant encouragement, LrC has linked the photos up until October 17 of last year, but it fails to connect to pix of our granddaughters first birthday party four days later.

It’s all mysterious and frustrating.

I find that as I age, the three categories of collapse have an increasing tendency to overlap.

14.4.1.  In fact, things went kablooey when I upgraded from 14.3 to 14.4, and then 14.4.1.

Looking more closely, the earliest pix I have in it are slide scans from 1997, and that confused me. The earliest digital photos
are from May 2006.

Thanks for your help!!!

Rick

Rick - FWIW…

I am on OS 14.4.1, LRC 13.2
My All Photographs shows 289,571 images. I very seldom have all 289,000 immediately accessible to me. My internal drive has the LRC catalog and ancillary files, plus 2023 and 2024 images.
(Periodically duplicated/backed up on external drives.) Space constraints meant that I recently needed to move my 2022 images from my internal to my primary external drive (with backups of course).

The 2022 and earlier images are on external drives (going back to some Optio images from 2002-03). Scanned images from slides or wherever are in a Scanned folder, not separated by Date, but the file name for each image incorporates the date of the original.

When I wanted to pull out the Bridge image I posted for this month’s PDML Gallery, I powered up the relevant external drive, used LRC to open the "Photos-2014 Master" folder on that external, paused for a run to the coffee machine for a refill (while that year's images were being accessed by LRC), back to my computer, opened the 2014-May and 2014-Jun folders, quick Keyword search of the folders  in LRC for “Grandfather", scrolled, opened, exported the image re-sized to fit Brian’s Gallery image specs, closed Photos-2014 Master, ejected and powered down the external drive.

I have used variations of this set up since LR1.0. At first I had folders by Subject (e.g. Spring Flowers, Cancun Trip, Cats, etc.) I quickly realized that date-oriented file naming and storing made more sense if/when combined with a decent SQL-based database management system like LRC, coupled with some keywording, and would work best for me.

Periodic software upgrades, updates, aperiodic removal of image files from internal to external drives. So far, knock on wood, fingers crossed, I have not lost any image files. Most of my B&W negatives from the 1960’s-1990’s were ruined in our flood in 2020 but my computer and several generations of external drives were safely high enough.

In short, I have never experienced the sort of problem you are describing. Could be software? Delete and reinstall LRC. Could be OS related?  Back up everything, then delete everything, re-start, re-install the OS and all of your other software. Hardware related? Doesn’t seem likely, but… You could replicate your LRC installation and image files on another computer and see if that makes any difference. E.g., in our “local” Facebook Marketplace, I noticed a listing yesterday for a 2021 MacBook Pro, decent specs with respect to internal memory etc., $500. Buy something like that, play with it for awhile, re-sell it once your problem is resolved…

Good luck!

Stan