Greetings All,

I'm quitting Lightroom and never going back to it because of how LR uses one catalog to keep track of photos and changes to those photos.

A backup hard drive on my PC died. When I replaced it I made the bad mistake (because of LR cataloging) of putting the drive containing my photos in its location. Windows changed the drive letter designations so all my photos were now on D: drive instead of the previous E: drive. My LR catalog was located in the LR directory on the the new D: drive but thought that itself and all the photos and changes it had cataloged were still on E:.

With the change in drive letters ALL photos became invisible to LR.

Similar LR confusions on a smaller scale had happened to me in the past. Since all additions, deletions, changes to photo file names or relocations MUST BE MADE USING LIGHTROOM TO BE VISIBLE TO LIGHTROOM if anything is done with Windows that doesn't exactly follow LR requirements, imagine the difficulty in recovering files. In other words, your only tool to recover photos and changes is using an application, LR, where those same files are invisible to it. The recovery procedures are difficult with one or two directories but its almost impossible with thousands of files in hundreds of invisible directories and sub-directories.

I exactly (I thought) followed the LR procedures for recovering lost files. The first attempt with the first file didn't work, so I made a small change which I thought was correct and that seemed to work. But very quickly, the ONLY thing my one LR catalog remembered were a few files I successfully recovered, but none of the LR modifications were remembered for thousands of other photos.

I obviously did something wrong, but a photo processing system shouldn't be that fragile and hard to manage with something as critical as cataloging and keeping track of changes to photos.

Besides this catastrophic loss of so much work, LR can be a slow dog of a program. My PC isn't a speed demon but its pretty fast, with 12g of memory and a dedicated graphics card. I've literally waited 20 seconds for two comparison photos to come into focus using LR, a royal pain if a day's shoot had 250 photos!

I'm looking for another photo processing system that's powerful with a good work flow. Right now, Paintshop Pro X8 is top contender. Any suggestions will be very appreciated.

The OP's problem was indeed due to 2 letters, not LR, but PC. As soon as I read what the PC archeology had done in changing the drive letters, I knew there would be trouble coming. I used to hate, hate, hate the PC's design for automatically assigning drive letters to new drives. However, I don't have that problem now with a Mac. I am sorry that you are having so much problem with LR, but as the other posters have stated, the problem is not LR, it's your stupid PC that caused the problem. I realize that I have not added anything constructive to your post, but just wanted to add my 2 cents worth to the other posters' comments about LR not being the problem here. If your budget can afford it, take a look at the Mac. It's worth every penny of peace and quiet. When you add a new external hard drive to the Mac, you get to name the drive with whatever name you want to call it: 1 or A or Bruce, etc

Greetings All,

I'm quitting Lightroom and never going back to it because of how LR uses one catalog to keep track of photos and changes to those photos.

A backup hard drive on my PC died. When I replaced it I made the bad mistake (because of LR cataloging) of putting the drive containing my photos in its location. Windows changed the drive letter designations so all my photos were now on D: drive instead of the previous E: drive. My LR catalog was located in the LR directory on the the new D: drive but thought that itself and all the photos and changes it had cataloged were still on E:.

With the change in drive letters ALL photos became invisible to LR.

Similar LR confusions on a smaller scale had happened to me in the past. Since all additions, deletions, changes to photo file names or relocations MUST BE MADE USING LIGHTROOM TO BE VISIBLE TO LIGHTROOM if anything is done with Windows that doesn't exactly follow LR requirements, imagine the difficulty in recovering files. In other words, your only tool to recover photos and changes is using an application, LR, where those same files are invisible to it. The recovery procedures are difficult with one or two directories but its almost impossible with thousands of files in hundreds of invisible directories and sub-directories.

I exactly (I thought) followed the LR procedures for recovering lost files. The first attempt with the first file didn't work, so I made a small change which I thought was correct and that seemed to work. But very quickly, the ONLY thing my one LR catalog remembered were a few files I successfully recovered, but none of the LR modifications were remembered for thousands of other photos.

I obviously did something wrong, but a photo processing system shouldn't be that fragile and hard to manage with something as critical as cataloging and keeping track of changes to photos.

Besides this catastrophic loss of so much work, LR can be a slow dog of a program. My PC isn't a speed demon but its pretty fast, with 12g of memory and a dedicated graphics card. I've literally waited 20 seconds for two comparison photos to come into focus using LR, a royal pain if a day's shoot had 250 photos!

I'm looking for another photo processing system that's powerful with a good work flow. Right now, Paintshop Pro X8 is top contender. Any suggestions will be very appreciated.