LR keeps hanging up when you try to move a photo...

photomagic

Hello.

I am trying to move a photo from one folder to another, but LR keeps hanging up. It shows up in the left hand corner "moving photos" with a blank line and x at the end of it, but nothing happens. I waited 20 minutes and nothing happens, so I restarted LR and tried it again and same thing. How do I fix this? Please help.

Thank you!
Michele

digismile

Michele,

This kind of problem can be caused by a multitude of issues, and isn't always easy to diagnose/fix. If you search Google, you will see a lot of hits, with many different suggestions.

So let's check a few things:

1. Have you made any recent changes to your computer system in recent weeks? i.e. upgraded the operating system, replaced a hard drive.

2. Were you moving photos in LR before and did it just recently stop working?

3. Do you use RAW files?

4. Have you ever optimized your catalog?

5. Are you using LR 2 or LR 1 and are you up to date all updates?

Very often the culprit is a corrupt settings file, a cache file problem, or temp/swap space issue. Generally when this happens, you often have other performance issues as well. Maybe things have been getting slower and you just haven't noticed it so much.

The very first thing that is usually recommended by Adobe is to replace your LR Preferences file. This is easy to do. You just need to first look at all your preferences and write them down. Here's a link to a simple tutorial on replacing the Preferences file.

Try this first to see if this solves your issue and if not, we can look at other system/hardware issues.

Also, here is a link to some tips for improving LR speed.

regards,

Ann McRae

Hey Brad

This might just be what I need. I had LR crash and tell me that my catalogue was not recoverable. Now it won't open files, although I can open them from LR installed on another computer (they're on an external).

All my LR troubles started when I was using LR2.6 beta, and it expired.

Thanks for the tutorial. I will try tomorrow.

ann

Ann McRae

Well, I have finally gotten around to deleting the preference files, and it seems to have worked in that Lightroom will now open the files it wasn't opening previously.

However, the catalogue that I had, which was unrepairable previously, is still unrepairable - guess that shouldn't be a surprise. Gives me the opportunity to re-edit things should I so desire. I did not have any unsaved works in progress, since I double save everything. I always save the edits as jpegs in a separate folder.

Thanks Brad, would never have known to try.

ann