Lightroom Classic 7.3.1 Update

You may not have noticed, but Adobe released an update to Lightroom Classic yesterday to address a few urgent bugs that needed squashing. If you don’t see the update in your application manager, click the 3 dot menu and choose Check for App Updates. You should then see this next to Classic:

Preset Issues

I’ve installed the update, and so far so good. One of the issues this update fixes is the fact that our presets were not sorting correctly within the preset folders of the Presets panel. This seems to have been resolved.

However, it doesn’t revert back to the previous behavior that allowed us to surface our custom preset folders to the top by using a leading number when naming the custom folder. See my previous post on how to work around this. This update should have also resolved any issues with presets failing to convert to XMP (and as a consequence failing to show in the Presets panel).

Some people are also reporting reduced performance related to the new preset rollover preview functionality that appeared in the 7.3 update. While this update does not resolve that issue, Adobe is looking for people experiencing those problems to reach out and potentially join a special test group. See this discussion in the Lightroom family forum for more details.

Backup Catalog Problem

The most critical issue addressed in this update has to do with potential corruption of the Lightroom-created catalog backups. It is recommended that you run the backup process after updating to 7.3.1 to create a fresh backup copy free of the previous problem. Take the time to create a new backup of the catalog, then attempt to open the backup into Classic to make sure it works without error. This is not something you want to discover at an inopportune moment. Here’s how I tested my most recent backup copy (read the entire post before you begin):

• Install the 7.3.1 update.
• Launch Lightroom Classic, and go to Preferences > General, and configure your Default catalog to be the specific catalog you want to open each time you launch Lightroom Classic (don’t use Load Most Recent).
• Go to Catalog Settings > General, and configure the backup catalog schedule (I have mine set to run on every exit, and then skip when I don’t need it).
• Exit Lightroom Classic to trigger the backup to run.
• Once the backup process is complete, use your file browser to open the folder where you told Lightroom to save the backup copies.
• If the backup is compressed into a zip file, unzip the catalog.
• Place a copy of the backup catalog (.lrcat extension) into a temporary folder for testing (I created a temp folder on my desktop for this purpose).
• Double-click the copy of the catalog in the temporary folder to open it into Classic to verify it opens without error.

Note, the backup only includes the catalog file itself, and no previews. So when you first open that backup catalog you won’t see any thumbnails. Don’t panic, this is to be expected. Lightroom will immediately create a new preview cache in that temp folder you created and thumbnails will start to appear.

As long as the catalog functions just like your working catalog, then all is well. If you have any problems, report them over in the Lightroom Family forum.

Once the test is complete, exit Lightroom (skip the backup if prompted). You can then delete the temporary folder you created for this test. Your actual backup should still be safe and sound in the actual backup location.

Launch Lightroom Classic your normal way and make sure your original working catalog opens (verify by going to Catalog Settings > General to confirm the name and location of the catalog).

One final note, it seems there is a new issue on Mac (only) related to catalog backups in that they are no longer automatically compressed into zip files if the catalog is under 4GB. I can confirm this is true in my experience. Adobe recommends manually compressing them to save disk space. That is fine, but I only keep the most recent 3 or 4 and delete the old ones, so for now I will simply leave them unzipped (as we did for the first 5 versions of Lightroom), and clear out the backup location each month. If you’d rather compress yours, you’ll just have to do it manually for now.

There are a few additional fixes in this update you can read about in Adobe’s own new feature summary.