Lightroom 3 crashes opening catalog

Anyone know a way to tell lightroom not to load previous catalog without being in lightroom? My father's lightroom 3 install is trying to open a weird catalog, it is an image.lrcat, don't even think the file exists but it keeps trying to load it which causes it to immediately crash on load. I tried -restart loading it from command line as well as specifying a catalog file to load saying lightroom <catalog> but that doesn't work either.

Running Windows 7.

Never mind, I found a way around it. I found the image file it was referencing and renamed it. Somehow it he tried to load an image file as a catalog and it made lightroom go nuts.

Glad you solved your problem, but in case somebody else needs the answer to your question, if you press Ctrl while launching LR it first opens a dialog asking which catalog to use

tzalman wrote in post #12391387
Glad you solved your problem, but in case somebody else needs the answer to your question, if you press Ctrl while launching LR it first opens a dialog asking which catalog to use

Awesome thanks!

Not sure if it was my father or a bug, but it was actually trying to open an image file as a catalog. I knew this because it would show "opening catalog img_2890.jpg.lrcat" but there was no file with this name, yet when I renamed the three files named img_2890.jpg on his machine, it opened fine. I suspect he tried to open an image as a catalog, thinking he was importing. He is still fairly knew to Lightroom and is used to Paintshop.

Saxi wrote in post #12391644
I suspect he tried to open an image as a catalog, thinking he was importing. He is still fairly knew to Lightroom and is used to Paintshop.

That sounds like a likely culprit!

But, that is not good behavior on the part of Lightroom -- there have over the history of the app been bugs that have popped up and they have addressed them. Sadly, robust error handling often follows late in a software product lifecycle, although I found by hard experience that it should be a vital part of the core design.

Otherwise we see things like the above because the software "builders" have to basically go through every function of code, looking for ways that things can go bad, and add a robust way of handling things, all after the software is out on the market!

Fortunately Lightroom keeps well to a schedule of regular updates and provides fixes for this type of thing once they are identified and resolved -- they are much better at this type of stuff than a lot of apps who are just release it and forget about it.

So, my advice (and actually a helpful thing for the LR team) would be that you go to the LR site and file a Bug Report for this, describing what happened and what you suspect was the cause (trying to open an image as a catalog and not recognizing that problem and gracefully backing out).

And, hopefully a soon update will adress that and you will save some people some grief!

tonylong wrote in post #12393398
That sounds like a likely culprit!

But, that is not good behavior on the part of Lightroom -- there have over the history of the app been bugs that have popped up and they have addressed them. Sadly, robust error handling often follows late in a software product lifecycle, although I found by hard experience that it should be a vital part of the core design.

Otherwise we see things like the above because the software "builders" have to basically go through every function of code, looking for ways that things can go bad, and add a robust way of handling things, all after the software is out on the market!

Fortunately Lightroom keeps well to a schedule of regular updates and provides fixes for this type of thing once they are identified and resolved -- they are much better at this type of stuff than a lot of apps who are just release it and forget about it.

So, my advice (and actually a helpful thing for the LR team) would be that you go to the LR site and file a Bug Report for this, describing what happened and what you suspect was the cause (trying to open an image as a catalog and not recognizing that problem and gracefully backing out).

And, hopefully a soon update will adress that and you will save some people some grief!

It may not even have been my fathers fault, could have flat out been a bug. It was the weirdest thing, it was trying to open img_2890.jpg.lrcat (file did not exist anywhere) but when I renamed img_2890.jpg to img_2890.jpg.jpg problem went away and it opened blank catalog.

I hit them up on Twitter and let them know the problem. Hopefully they can make some sense of it.