Lightroom disaster

[ADMint]

or switch out of LR.

The biggest issue is time. I don't have a lot of spare time to investigate this, and I need to have a functioning system.

If your issue is time then switching to another program should not be an option. And as I have told you before and other people as well it will most probably not solve your issue. \

Fastest way:

Buy a new computer

Optimal way:

Google your BSOD error message.

I bet it is a hard drive problem and that can be fixed with a new hard drive. Get an SSD to get better performance too. Backup everything and just do it .

Acutally you can just post the dump files in the Windows 8 forums here (BSOD Crashes and Debugging) and have one of our dump file specialists look at it. It also helps eliminate the "guess work" malch was alluding to. For Windows 7, go here... BSOD Help and Support

Peace.

--
A photograph is usually looked at - seldom looked into – Ansel Adams

 

[skyglider]

I've had Lightroom for years; it's an essential part of my fine art photography.

When I upgraded to LR5 last year, I began to have sporadic crashes, mostly involving image importing and tagging. By "crash" I mean the whole computer suddenly shuts down, destroying any work in progress with other programs. Machine is an HP Pavilion with 8g memory, running Windows 7 Professional.

Read most of your thread but sorry if I missed the following:

Since you said your PC is dust free, do you have a backup that was done prior to upgrading to LR5 last year when LR4 was running fine? If so, backing up your (current system*) and then restoring that old backup should be the first step of your troubleshooting procedure.

In fact, installing an even older backup when you FIRST got LR4 running would be a good troubleshooting step in case a backup JUST BEFORE you installed LR5, already has Windows corruption or infection.

You don't need to worry about losing data because of restoring an early known good backup. The restore of the early backup is just a test to see if there is any Windows or other corruption that is causing your current problems. You can restore your (current system*) backup to return to normal.

If you have a spare hard drive, even a small capacity old one, another step could be to remove your current system HDD and replace it with the spare HDD. Then do a clean install of Windows and LR5. If you still have LR5 problems after doing that, then you "know" the problem is in your hardware.

Sky

 

[malch]

Acutally you can just post the dump files in the Windows 8 forums here (BSOD Crashes and Debugging) and have one of our dump file specialists look at it. It also helps eliminate the "guess work" malch was alluding to. For Windows 7, go here... BSOD Help and Support

Good point. But even before that I suggest looking at the Windows Event Log. It may contain really helpful information.

Another poster did mention this but I think it's worth repeating. It doesn't always provide the answer but it's quick and easy to check.

 

[Desert Cruiser]

We use Corel's PaintShop Pro X7 and then mostly for images we then open a plug-in called Clarity by Topaz Labs which works inside of PSP X7. They do not strain the computer and they'll do anything you can do in LR. In fact we have all Topaz Labs plug-ins, Clarity being our most used one. Also if you want to check your computer, for heat, ram and processor speed look into this desktop widget, it's a real help and it gives you real time temps. HERE

 

[Patco]

Currently trialing Aftershot Pro 2 and ACDSee. We'll see.

But not Qimage Ultimate.

You say you would be prepared to give up LR. You asked me for a suggestion and then start trialing two software systems not even mentioned in this thread.

Why? I'd really love to know.

Tony

Actually, I mentioned AfterShot Pro 2 in this thread before you suggested Qimage Ultimate.

(I would have mentioned ACDSee Ultimate 8, as well, but I was addressing the Linux aspect ;-) )

 

[colonel444]

Firstly you need find out if this is a hardware or software problem.

The surest way to eliminate software issue is by starting fresh. Backup everything first, then format the hard drive and reinstall Windows and Lightroom 5. Don't install any drivers or other softwares yet at this time. Then create a new catalog, and work on it.

If still crashes, then you know it's a hardware problem.

 

[Billy Ray Valentine]

I've had Lightroom for years; it's an essential part of my fine art photography.

When I upgraded to LR5 last year, I began to have sporadic crashes, mostly involving image importing and tagging. By "crash" I mean the whole computer suddenly shuts down, destroying any work in progress with other programs. Machine is an HP Pavilion with 8g memory, running Windows 7 Professional.

In the past month the issue began to accelerate. Soon LR became unrunnable.

I upgraded last week to LR6, thinking that might solve the problem.

Instead, it's become far worse. At first I got blue screen crashes every time I opened LR and ran it for more than five minutes. Now it's accelerated to the point that the computer no longer functions, even if I don't run LR. I'm about to do a system restore to get things going again.

Anyone else have this experience? Adobe customer service is non-existent. I can find no way to email them, and customer "chat" hasn't responded.

At this point I'm weighing several options:

Give up on Lightroom. It's expensive and bloated. I could run everything off Linux if I didn't need LR. Trouble is, there is no other single program that does image management and processing as well for me.

Give up on the HP computer. This seems to be a rare problem. Another computer might solve the issue and get me back to work. I could use a faster one anyway.

Give up on Windows. Thing is, I rather like Windows, and despite some years of experience with that other system, I don't much like Apple. (Most recent bad experience: My son, who's travelling the world this year to try to set a world Big Year birding record, was home for a few days last week and needed to upgrade his now nearly nonfunctional iPhone 4. He bought a new iPhone 6, and then learned that the phone store couldn't transfer any of his files from one to the other; the Apple store in town, wouldn't; and the approved Apple solution -- using iTunes to manage the transfer -- required him to install a new version of iOS on his new phone. After hours of downloading iOS, the phone crashed. The solution: I downloaded a $20 program onto my Windows computer and made the transfer of files from one phone to the other in an hour.)

Try to find an installation disc for LR4. Anyone got one?

OK, enough kvetching. Anyone out there got a great idea to solve this?

Thanks.

If you are getting BSOD, it could be the computer physical memory. LR uses a lot of memory and reserves it on startup. You may be hitting the bad area not hit in normal day to day use. Sounds like it is getting "worse" over time and LR6 uses more memory that LR5, both make me lean this way.

Memory is cheap these days and this would take 10 mins to swap it to rule it out as an issue. Even if you are not a techie, watch a couple how to videos, it is really easy.

 

[Billy Ray Valentine]

Tony,

I'm completely open to abandoning LR. One possibility would be to use separate programs for image management, processing, and printing. So much the better if they're free and open source, like most of the other software I use.

What photo software do you use?

Bob

Check out AcdSee's products. AcdSee 18 is about the fastest tool out there for management and basic edits of files.

 

[Camley]

I've had Lightroom for years; it's an essential part of my fine art photography.

When I upgraded to LR5 last year, I began to have sporadic crashes, mostly involving image importing and tagging. By "crash" I mean the whole computer suddenly shuts down, destroying any work in progress with other programs. Machine is an HP Pavilion with 8g memory, running Windows 7 Professional.

In the past month the issue began to accelerate. Soon LR became unrunnable.

I upgraded last week to LR6, thinking that might solve the problem.

Instead, it's become far worse. At first I got blue screen crashes every time I opened LR and ran it for more than five minutes. Now it's accelerated to the point that the computer no longer functions, even if I don't run LR. I'm about to do a system restore to get things going again.

Anyone else have this experience? Adobe customer service is non-existent. I can find no way to email them, and customer "chat" hasn't responded.

At this point I'm weighing several options:

Give up on Lightroom. It's expensive and bloated. I could run everything off Linux if I didn't need LR. Trouble is, there is no other single program that does image management and processing as well for me.

Give up on the HP computer. This seems to be a rare problem. Another computer might solve the issue and get me back to work. I could use a faster one anyway.

Give up on Windows. Thing is, I rather like Windows, and despite some years of experience with that other system, I don't much like Apple. (Most recent bad experience: My son, who's travelling the world this year to try to set a world Big Year birding record, was home for a few days last week and needed to upgrade his now nearly nonfunctional iPhone 4. He bought a new iPhone 6, and then learned that the phone store couldn't transfer any of his files from one to the other; the Apple store in town, wouldn't; and the approved Apple solution -- using iTunes to manage the transfer -- required him to install a new version of iOS on his new phone. After hours of downloading iOS, the phone crashed. The solution: I downloaded a $20 program onto my Windows computer and made the transfer of files from one phone to the other in an hour.)

Try to find an installation disc for LR4. Anyone got one?

OK, enough kvetching. Anyone out there got a great idea to solve this?

Thanks.

LR6 isn't a problem on my Windows 8.1 machine with one exception. When my PC goes to sleep, after waking, LR (5 or 6) takes a long time to return to normal operation. It's better to turn LR off if I am leaving the PC for a while.

My PC also goes into a mode where the HD is working hard. Nothing works well then. I don't know whether this is caused by Norton Security (I only have manual scans selected) or an internal Windows system issue.

I did find that my HP h8-1222 doesn't have a video card that can take advantage of LR-6. I isn't worthwhile for me to replace the card but I will make sure that the video card on my next PC is capable.

So to answer your question: None of the above. I would find out the reason for the problems.

 

[Archer66]

It's a long shot but try to delete LR prefrences first.

Loading…

www.lightroomforums.net

 

[skyglider]

LR6 isn't a problem on my Windows 8.1 machine with one exception. When my PC goes to sleep, after waking, LR (5 or 6) takes a long time to return to normal operation. It's better to turn LR off if I am leaving the PC for a while.

Would it be better to turn off all sleep options? I do because I can't stand waiting for things to wake up.

My PC also goes into a mode where the HD is working hard. Nothing works well then. I don't know whether this is caused by Norton Security (I only have manual scans selected) or an internal Windows system issue.

The probable cause is Windows search indexing. I "REALLY" hate that auto indexing so I turned it off. Plus I've found that Windows search did not find a file that I knew existed on my hard drive. Worthless IMO. Don't know if later versions of Windows search can find everything since I dropped using it.

I use Agent Ransack to search my PC if I need to find something. I learned about it in this forum. Great PC search engine!

Sky

 

[bkpix]

A Monday morning update: Figuring I had nothing to lose but a little more of my time, I wiped the HD on my computer yesterday and reinstalled Windows 7. (This is a level of geekdom that is unfamiliar to me, to say the least, but it was either figure that out or go buy a new computer today.) Then I re-installed LR6, and connected to the external drive where I keep my catalog and about 45k photos.

So far so good. I played around with the installation for quite a while last night, trying to stress it. Then I let LR run all night. This morning all still looks good, even with the addition of LibreOffice and a couple other programs. If it's a hardware issue, I haven't been able to replicate it. So it looks like Win7 got corrupted.

Thanks very much to everyone who commented! This has been quite an education. For one thing, after trying various other photo editing and management programs, I realized I really do like LR. It does everything I need in one place. So it's good to have it all working again (assuming it's still working tonight!)

 

[olakiril2]

That is good news but don't rule out the bad drive. Formatting and reinstalling everything can remove errors on critical files, but in a faulty drive the error rate is going to be high so things can get messy very soon. I suggest you replace the drive with a new one now that you are at it.

 

[hugh321]

How long did it take you to install the windows up dates after you reinstalled windows 7 ?

 

[ernstbk]

How long did it take you to install the windows up dates after you reinstalled windows 7 ?

That is a very good question.

 

[bkpix]

I haven't plumbed those (updated) waters yet. It may be auto updating as we speak; I'll know more when I get home tonight.

Bob

 

[hugh321]

How are you doing with the Windows updates? Does your previously installed Light room still function?

 

[bkpix]

Yes, Windows is all updated (not sure how long it took, as I started it and went to bed) and LR6 works great.

So far....

 

[hugh321]

Thank you. I have friend that needs to do the same thing.