Award Sounds Music, Photography and Consultancy

I've just had my first big issue with Adobe's Lightroom. I still think it's a great product and now that it's past 1.0, a lot of the stability issues have been ironed out. That doesn't mean that they've all gone though. Today, I figured out a way to recover from Lightroom's continual spinning wheel and 100% CPU utilisation.

I spent a few hours in the last week adding, cataloguing and editing photos that I'd accumulated over summer. The backlog was due to figuring out which software I wanted to purchase.

Today, I imported a TIFF file and Lightroom crashed. After a force-quit, I relaunched and found the spinning wheel. Nothing would remove it. I repaired permissions, removed preferences, even removed the lock and journal files of Lightroom's database (not recommended by the way). Force-quit and relaunch and the same thing happened. There was no way into the menus to change any options since the spinning wheel appeared first and one of the cores maxed out at 100% before it swapped, maxing out the different cores in turn. Using google to search through the Adobe website (since their own search facility doesn't work right now, nor does user registration) returned no useful answers, but did state the locations of some important files. More useful was Inside Lightroom but even that didn't help in this case.

I have Lightroom on the dock. I use it often enough. Press the ALT-key when you click. Lightroom will launch but ask you which catalogue you want to open. I created a new catalogue in a different directory to the problematic catalogue. Then in that catalogue, I selected to import all the images from the other catalogue. At first this reported an error with another application accessing the catalogue. So I moved the lock and journal files from the problematic catalogue's directory and tried again. This time a successful import.

I can't guarantee it will work for you or even recommend the approach. For me, I turned a non-working software application into something working and managed to get the photographs ready in time for the deadline. I was concerned, like one of Inside Lightroom's authors, that I'd be propagating the problem into another catalogue, but fortunately it all seems to work comfortably and I'm back on track. And as I mentioned, I still like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and it's my software of choice for managing and manipulating my images, especially as I need something more functional (and less restricted) than iPhoto, but not as powerful as Photoshop CS3.

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