Your mileage may vary, but this process just saved my hide. I’m writing this as a quick reminder in case I ever need to do this again. Running OSX Yosemite on a Mac Pro, using OSX’s default/included sqlite3 binary (SQLite version 3.8.5).
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Fire up Terminal
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Navigate to the directory that contains your Lightroom Catalog, example (mine is on an external hard drive)
cd /Volumes/GIGAWATT/PHOTO/
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Use sqlite3 to dump your Lightroom Catalog as an .sql file:
echo .dump | sqlite3 Master_Catalog.lrcat > master_catalog.sql
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Then re-generate your .lrcat using sqlite3 and the sql dump you just created:
sqlite3 master_catalog_restored.lrcat < master_catalog.sql
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Open your restored catalog in Lightroom. Wipe nervous sweat from brow. Smile.
I’d been keeping my catalog in a Dropbox folder for the sole reason of having it automatically versioned and backed up by the good folks at Dropbox. It had worked well for the better part of 6 months but something got out of whack. During the last few days I could only get my catalog to open once and then it would randomly crash and complain of trouble “reading the catalog file”.
I tried repairing it using the built in “repair catalog” pop-up in Lightroom. No dice. I also tried creating a new catalog and “Importing from another Catalog” (importing from the one that was giving me issues). That didn’t work either. I could restore one good version from Dropbox and get it to open, but if I tried to back up that version or do anything else, it would immediately crash. After a google search I found this post by Gordon Haff (which was a hair outdated) but got me going in the right direction. Thanks Gordon!
This method of dumping and restoring worked to fix whatever the hell was wrong. I don’t know why or how. Fuck keeping my main catalog in a dropbox folder though, it’s too important. I’m back to keeping it on the same external drive as my archive, backing up once a week via lightroom to the same catalog location and then automatically copying that to a secondary backup drive every other day.
Two types of people. Those who have backups, and those that will. 🙂
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