Lightroom stopped working

For some unknown reason, LR stopped working. I'm running Windows 10 and Adobe Lightroom Classic CC. When I open up LR, it goes to the last successful picture I was editing but then when I try to do anything, it hangs up and reports that LR 'not responding' and greys out the screen. Then it just hangs up. When i terminate the program, it reports that LR is not responding and I have a choice of waiting for it to respond, or closing. Anyone else ever had this problem?

Something is corrupted in the installation or the library. The library is backed up automatically. You might see if one of the backups works. Failing that, hopefully, you know where the actual images are stored, not just in piles at the discretion of LR. Protect them and the various library versions. Then uninstall, reboot, and re-install LR CC Classic

I am no IT expert, but like all Microsoft OS since the dawn of time (or since DOS), try a shutdown and then restart the machine. If that does not work, then I would do what Ed suggested.

Try resetting your lightroom preferences before messing with a catalog restore.

 

How to set Lightroom Classic CC preferences

 

After you reset, you may have to browse to the catalog location - you may get prompted or you might have to do it from the menu after it launches. I don't think I've had to do it since Lightroom 6, so I don't remember the default opening behavior after a reset.

I agree with Paul: using a catalog backup would be a last resort, as you would lose every edit since then. They are not automatic; you set a preference to tell the program how often to back up. I do it weekly.

 

I would do it in this order:

1. Reboot, if you haven't.

2. See if LR works. If not:

3. Reset preferences and see if LR works. If not:

4. Uninstall LR, reboot, and reinstall it. As Paul said, locate your old catalog if it doesn't find it. See if LR works.

 

Only if that fails would I start up the most recent backup catalog, and before doing that, I would rename the current one to protect it.

@ken I forgot to mention that I had shutdown and rebooted multiple times. That's my first line of defense in any such computer problems.

 

I think I solved the problem without having to resort to Ed's intimidating instructions. I noticed that the free space on my hard drive had dropped below the 10% of total recommended by MS. So I deleted a bunch of files and miraculously LR is now working. I read on-line that this might be a problem so in this case it seems to have done the trick. Thanks all for your input!

I store all of my photographs on a separate drive, a Drobo array, which is an improved RAID (hot swaps allowed, automatic striping). It's amazing how quickly image can fill an internal drive (I'm up to 3.75 TB), taking space from files that must reside internally.

 

Lightroom can construct collections of diverse images, which can then be copied to the Adobe Cloud. I make collections of limited sized JPEG images (3600 x 2400 pixels), which I can use for "show and tell" with a phone or pad. Even an iPad can store a lot of 50 MP images.

 

Switching libraries is quick and easy. Simply select which library (or copy) you wish to use. Re-constructing a library is also easy, but can take a long time. If you move files to a different disk or directory you can "Update" the file location for a single image, directory or sub-directory on the destination disk (my images are stored in subdirectories under a root directory "Photos." If it works, it is quick and easy, and preserves all of the XIF data with your editing changes. A much longer process requires re-importation of images or directories. This sweeps up anything you might have missed or failed to import along the way.