| Lightroom is a great program for managing large numbers of photos. Experienced Lightroom users with hundreds of thousands of images, such as professional photographers, save their Lightroom data into multiple Lightroom libraries. So I have the test images for CameraStuffReview stored in separate libraries for each year. One of the few disadvantages of Lightroom is that you can not open multiple libraries simultaneously. A detour can! |
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The problem of working with multiple Lightroom catalogs |
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| If you want to open a second library from Lightroom, you will get the message that the current library and Lightroom has to be closed first. When I’m working on a test run in the Lightroom 2014 library, I can not look up a test image shot in 2012 without closing the 2014 library and Lightroom first. After Lightroom closed and restarted with the 2012 library, I seek for the image shot in 2012. After that, I close the 2012 library and lightroom, open Lightroom and the 2014 library to continue my work. I would rather have both libraries open next to each other. |
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Lightroom bug: work-around to open several libraries simultaneously |
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| Suppose you’re at work in Lightroom and want to find a photo in another Lightroom library. Open Windows Explorer and double-click the name of the other library. You will get the same message as from Lightroom: Relaunch Lightroom with this catalog?. Do not choose Relaunch, but choose Cancel. | |
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| To my surprise, Lightroom opened a second library. Below are two libraries that are open simultaneously in Lightroom. I have a PC with enough memory (16GB) and everything works perfect. I am using a PC. Whether it works on an Apple, I do not know. I hope so. | |
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| Now lets keep our fingers fingers crossed (I need your help here) that Adobe does not fix this bug, so we can continue using multiple Lightroom libraries! | |
| Contribution from one of our readers (Thankls John): Update: I had checked that checkbox, but clicking Cancel cancels the opening of the new catalog with LR 5.7. To clear the “do not show” prompt, close LR, go into AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Lightroom\Preferences, open the Lightroom # Preferences.agprefs file in a text editor, search for “AgLibrary_relaunchLightroomForNewLibrary,”. It should show up in a line that starts with “doNotShowPrompts = “. Remove that AgLibrary string including the comma, save the agprefs and relaunch LR. | |
