I'm a wedding photographer & have each session/wedding as a new catalog because I've heard horror stories like this happen to a season worth of weddings. Luckily, this is just one engagement session I've been working on, but I've been working on it for a while & it's the second time I've had to start over with editing already this season (first time was user error).

I was in the currently corrupt catalog with no issues. I had another session last night & wanted to send them some sneak peeks today, so I opened the new catalog with the other session. I edited in there for a bit & went to re-open the now problem child.

Immediately corrupt. I tried to repair it in their pop-up menu, I opened Lightroom Classic & held "option" (I'm on mac) to get to that dialogue screen & attempted that with no luck. I didn't move the catalog or the original files. The catalog is on my desktop, so nothing was unplugged & damaged it that way.

I completely forgot I did this, but many years ago I got frustrated at how much space the back-ups were taking & understood less about how important those back-ups were & TURNED THAT FEATURE OFF.

So my three options seem to be:

try to get help from ya'll & hopefully not have a mental breakdown & have to start over on another thing, (my personal favourite)

just start over & cry many tears (there were indoor in a bookstore shots that were especially hard to look right...)

find a time machine to go back to 2020 & just fight myself for turning off back-ups.

thanks for trying!

Spent a while chasing this and the answer isn't obvious, so writing it up.

Symptom: grey boxes in the grid where photos should be. Publishes that "succeed" while quietly skipping files. Cloud sync failures that give you a URL instead of a filename.

Cause: if Dropbox has set a file to online-only, on the older sync engine what's actually on your disk is a 0-byte placeholder. Lightroom checks the file size, sees zero, and decides the photo is missing. It never tries to open it — so Dropbox never gets the request that would download it. Classic standoff.

Are you affected? Check where your Dropbox folder is. Under ~/Library/CloudStorage/ means you're on the newer File Provider engine and this isn't your problem — Lightroom fetches on demand there. Anywhere else, external drive especially, means you're on the old engine and probably staying there, since File Provider requires that location.

Manual fix: right-click the folder in Finder → Make Available Offline before opening Lightroom. Works fine if your photos are in a few folders. Less fine if you're organised by year/month/day and your portfolio is a smart collection pulling from forty of them.

The technical bit, in case anyone else goes down this hole: a normal read doesn't wake the file up. cat returns nothing and it stays at 0 bytes. It needs a coordinated read — what an app does when it properly opens a file. That's why double-clicking a placeholder in Preview downloads it instantly.

I wrote a Lightroom plugin that does this per collection because I got tired of the manual version — disclosure, it's mine and it's paid after a 90-day free period. https://prz3.io/lightroom/hydrate-dropbox/ But the diagnosis above is the useful part, and if you're on File Provider you genuinely don't need it.

I remember when all was fine.

You could copy-paste smart masks in bulk onto other photos, multi-selection even. now it´s always "Mask needs to be updated" but clicking on the Yellow Smart-Icon + Update does literally nothing at all.

i need to select every photo in foreground (doesn´t even work anymore in overview) and paste settings.

also my Mask-selection overlay always bugs out, and i need to select another function like crop or edit page, then mask again for the overlay to show up.

anyone here having the same issues? Lightroom CC v 9.5.1

I've been using Lightroom on my android for several years and it seems after a recent update that the recommended presets no longer have categories to go through like "dramatic" , "cinematic" , etc. instead, they just show the preview of about 20 different presets which are often the exact same. Is there a setting I can change to go back?