At Home with Tech

When your tenuous photo management process hits a wall, because your software gets glitchy, sometimes an obvious solution actually works. Let’s begin…

I’ll be honest… digital photo management has been a challenge for me since my 7-year-old son was born. I’m the kind of parent who takes way too many family photos and then struggles to organize them, quickly share the best ones and eventually create photo books.
(Sound familiar?)

But I’m trying.

The truth is you’ve just got to put in the time, have an organized plan, and use photo management software that’s right for you.

I switched to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 6 from Apple’s Aperture a couple years back after Apple retired Aperture and launched the Photos app.

I wanted software that was more powerful than Photos, and Lightroom has indeed proven itself to be a rock star.

At the time, I made the choice to buy a standalone Lightroom 6 license for $149, instead of Lightroom CC, which requires you to pay into a $10/month Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem.

I figured my one-time DVD purchase would be more economical than the pay-as-you-go model, as long as I used Lightroom for more than 15 months. That was the plan, and I’ve already passed the two year mark. So, yay Barrett.

But I know it’s just a matter of time until I’ll be joining Adobe’s Creative Cloud. It will eventually become unavoidable. For now though, I’ve been enjoying my Lightroom 6.

Until something went very wrong…

Random Crash Alert!
A few weeks back, my Lightroom began randomly crashing. It happened mostly when I wasn’t actually working with it. Lightroom would be open in the background, and then ‘pop,’ it would suddenly disappear. My iMac rushed to create a report to send to both Apple and Adobe, but I didn’t expect any engineers to be calling anytime soon.

I ignored the problem for a while. (Silly me.) But then, it began happening when I was actively using the program. And finally, it crashed while I was importing photos.

So, it was clearly time to do some troubleshooting…

The only recent change to my iMac’s ecosystem was an update to my iMac’s OS High Sierra. (And you know, that seemed to be about the time my troubles began.)

I did some Googling and ran across an insanely obvious question…
Was I running the most up-to-date version of Lightroom 6?

Uhhh…
What?

Huh.

Well, actually… No.
I hadn’t been receiving any notices about updates.
(I’m so used to Apple’s incessant reminders to update my software.)

So, no… I haven’t (ever) updated Lightroom 6.
(Maybe I did right after I installed it.)

Please don’t expel me from the Island of Misfit Toys.

All right…. So guess what I decided to do?

How to Update Adobe Lightroom
If you too are trying to figure this out, you’ll find your Lightroom software updates in the Adobe Application Manager program.
And here’s how to get there…

Go to the ‘Help’ drop down and click on ‘Updates…’
The Adobe Application Manager will open, and this is what you will see…

If you’ve got an update waiting, it’s time to take the blue pill.
From here, it’s straight forward!

Always Backup First
Updating Lightroom is a painless process, although it’s always good to do a backup before you update any important software.

For me, I simply ran Time Machine on my external G-Drive. And I also saved a backup Lightroom catalog file to the G-Drive.
(The catalog houses all the work you do to your photos.)

And guess what? Now that I’m running Lightroom 6.14… everything is…
Just… fine… again.

Yup.
Updating Lightroom did the trick.

Software Conundrum
I know my report ultimately falls under the category of “DUH!”

But can you tell me you’ve never dragged your feet on doing software updates, because you feared unexpected glitches and compatibility issues?

Well, if you wait long enough and do nothing, that’s clearly a problem too.
(And I’m not even talking about security patches.)

Choose your poison.

Lightroom stability: Restored!

#LovingMyDigitalLife