Recently, during an import of some photographs off of my camera’s SD card, I ran into an issue where Lightroom 4 seems to hang during the import. What seems to have led to this is the fact that the computer went to sleep during the initial import. About a third of the photographs made it into the catalog but the rest did not. Now, when trying to import, I get the following.
As you can see, the import bar is halfway completed but no photos are actually being imported.
One of the things I noticed is that Lightroom creates the temporary folder for the photos on the target disk, but only one photo is copied there. The rest of the import then does nothing. After quitting the import and then attempting to close Lightroom, I have to “Force Quit” in OS X, which then throws an exception.
My suspicion is that the issue is with Lightroom and I am missing a simple fix in all of my searches. I have tried repairing the target disk, repairing permissions on my computer’s hard drive, removing the Lightroom preferences file, and importing from a different disk. All lead to the same above result.
If you have any ideas, I would love to hear them!
Have you tried a different computer?
Have you tried just copying the files from the card to the drive, not using Lightroom? If you have multiple drives, do you have a scratch disk setup for Lightroom? If so, try changing the location.
If none of the above works, then it’s likely the card, and not Lightroom, so you’ll need a utility to recover the files.
I use : http://www.z-a-recovery.com/
It’s free and does a wonder on old cards that have images I never bothered to transfer.
Its for PCs, and hopefully someone can chime in on what they use for Macs.
Mark,
Thank you for the comment. I am able to copy the files from the card to the drive. I then tried to import from the local copy of the photos with the same result. This leads me to believe it is something with the Lightroom catalog. I am going to try and revert to an old backup and see if that works.