The first thing I did was download SQLite3 and SQLite3_analyze.
SQLite3_analyze confirmed there was indeed some sort of problem. “database image is malformed” it told me. Some searching never did tell me what that means exactly but, in any case, it confirmed there was a problem with the database.
The real find came from Gerhard Strasse’s blog. Read the blog but I just want to add a few comments.
Basically the steps are pretty simple.
First you dump the existing catalog into a text file as a bunch of SQL commands:
echo .dump | ./sqlite3 ~/lightroom_catalog.lrcat > ~/lightroom_catalog.sql
then, in theory, you can just suck that text into a new database file with:
./sqlite3 -init ~/lightroom_catalog.sql ~/lightroom_catalog_restore.lrcat
The blog notes that you may get an error or two (i.e. the duplicate keys or whatever that were causing the database issue) but it should work. It didn’t in my case. (lightroom_catalog_restore.lrcat was a zero byte file on the first try.) The secret for me was at the end of the comments.
Reader Chairat Juengmongkolwong noted that if, after the first step, you go into the text file (lightroom_catalog.sql in this case) and replace the last line that says:
ROLLBACK; — due to errors
with the line:
COMMIT TRANSACTION;
And THEN do the
./sqlite3 -init ~/lightroom_catalog.sql ~/lightroom_catalog_restore.lrcat
tripux 