What To Do If Lightroom Won’t Launch
This is a great tip (and one I did not know) from Adobe’s own Rikk Flohr who posted this as a comment here on my post about how to find Lightroom’s hidden “Reset Preferences” button. Here’s Rikk’s comment;
If, for some reason, you are unable to launch Lightroom Classic to access the Preferences dialog, there is a KBSC [keyboard shortcut] reset on launch you can use.
This procedure works for both Lightroom Classic and Lightroom Desktop.
Note: If you are using Lightroom Desktop, it can change your local storage location. Please review this setting after resetting preferences.
Reset Procedure:
1. Close Lightroom.
2. Hold down [Alt/Opt]+[Shift] while restarting Lightroom.
3. Overwrite the Preferences when prompted by the dialog.
4. Close Lightroom.
5. Restart Lightroom.
I had no idea. Thanks, Rikk! 🙂
one of the reasons Lightroom won’t launch is the lock file.
If Lightroom crashed it won’t delete the lock file that prevents another user to use Lightroom while it is open.
Deleting this temp file will probably solve the problem.
Deleting preferences file is only needed in rare cases…