Lightroom Error: Troubleshooting Part 3

category: Lightroom • 2 min read

Adobe has a whole set of procedures to troubleshoot the start up of Lightroom. One of their recommendations is:

  • Optimize the Catalog

Edit > Catalog Settings > General tab > Relaunch & Optimize

Adobe is instructing you to troubleshoot the catalog size and its speed. You probably won’t notice a significant difference on a small catalog…

What does the “catalog optimize” do?

You need to realize that the Lightroom catalog is in fact a SQLite database that contains everything. The SQLite database contains all the keywords, the image settings, the IPTC info, all the Develop steps such as cropping, brushes…

  1. Lightroom closes the catalog, the current catalog is already opened.
  2. SQLite removes all of the empty space in the catalog.
  3. Lightroom use SQLite to copy the database to a temporary one. The database copy is not a straight file copy but a table by table and row by row copy from your database to the temporary one.
  4. SQLite skips over the deleted images, the deleted history, the deleted keywords…
  5. The new Lightroom catalog is reordered so that all the tables in the catalog are contiguous.

When should you optimize the catalog?

  1. After adding any significant number of photos to your catalog.
  2. After deleting any significant number of photos to your catalog.
  3. After doing a significant amount of work in your catalog, such as “Develop”, keywords…

What’s any significant number of photos to your catalog?

  • When adding, it’s closer to 150 than 5, but there is no hard number. It depends on your hardware, the speed of your CPU, your amount of RAM, the speed and the fragmentation of your hard drive.
  • When deleting, it’s closer to 5 than 150, but there is no hard number. It depends on your hardware, the speed of your CPU, your amount of RAM, the speed and the fragmentation of your hard drive.

Lightroom LR_Errors