{"id":6887,"date":"2017-01-16T12:00:41","date_gmt":"2017-01-16T12:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/?p=6887"},"modified":"2017-01-15T23:09:26","modified_gmt":"2017-01-15T23:09:26","slug":"restoring-adobe-lightroom-backup-mac","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markwilson.co.uk\/blog\/2017\/01\/restoring-adobe-lightroom-backup-mac.htm","title":{"rendered":"Restoring Adobe Lightroom from backup (on a Mac)"},"content":{"rendered":"

For well over a year now, my digital\u00a0photography workflow has been in tatters. The Mac that I use for photo editing had some defective memory which corrupted the file system and the “genius” at the Apple Store reinstalled OS X. Data and application re-installation relies on\u00a0me though, and it just hasn’t risen high enough on my list of priorities… until now.<\/p>\n

So, I needed to:<\/p>\n

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  1. Re-install Adobe Lightroom (and the various other tools that\u00a0I use).<\/li>\n
  2. Restore my Lightroom catalog.<\/li>\n
  3. Repoint Lightroom to the new location of my images (I’ve given up trying to maintain enough space locally and they all now sit on a Synology NAS, backed up to Microsoft Azure<\/a>).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This post may be more for my benefit than for readers of the blog but you never know… someone might find parts of it useful.<\/p>\n

    Re-installing Lightroom<\/h3>\n

    Re-installing Lightroom is reasonably straightforward and these are the steps I took:<\/p>\n

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    1. Install Lightroom 5 from physical media (My Mac has no DVD drive, so I needed to use a USB-attached DVD drive).<\/li>\n
    2. Launch Lightroom from the finder.<\/li>\n
    3. When prompted, enter the serial number (or elect to use it in trial mode). My copy of Lightroom 5 is an upgrade, so I was prompted for the\u00a0previous serial number too (from Lightroom 3 in my case).<\/li>\n
    4. Lightroom needs to create a catalog. Let it get on with it.<\/li>\n
    5. Lightroom then detected that an upgrade was available (5.0-5.7) and it directed me to the Adobe website<\/a>, from where I downloaded 5.7.1. Incidentally, I have a feeling that these updates are the full product, and I could probably have used this for the original installation. That may be one to try next time…<\/del> [Update: that’s confirmed by Lightroom Queen<\/a>.]<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Restore the Lightroom Catalog<\/h3>\n

      Nex up, restoring the catalog. Amongst the many excellent posts from the Lightroom Queen is one titled “How do I move Lightroom to a new computer”<\/a>, which is kind of what I wanted to do, except in my case it’s “How do I move Lightoom from a backup of my computer to the currently-running version of my computer”.<\/p>\n

      Starting Lightroom had created two files in ~\/Pictures\/Lightroom called:<\/p>\n