Can't find my previous catalog in Lightroom

[psran]

I have made a silly mistake few days ago. I bought a new Olympus camera, when I inserted its card for Importing pics, Lightroom prompted me to make a new Catalog which I did.

Now the problem is that I cannot open my previous catalog which I used for Nikon D7000.

On googling a bit I found that it's should be there in C/users/pictures/lightroom4.Ircat but this catalog is not opening. I am getting a message that this Catalog is in use somewhere else.

Plz help me out of this. I have 1000s of pics in the catalog which are keyworded and I have made many adjustments to them. I cannot afford to lose them

 

[sscarmack]

Maybe you overwrited it when you made a new one?

Thats where the default location is /user/Pictures/

 

[psran]

Maybe you overwrited it when you made a new one?

Thats where the default location is /user/Pictures/

I don't think I overwritten it as I am still seeing another Catalog named Lightroom 4 catalog. Ircat but when I try to open it, a window pops out saying that it is already being used by some other program. How could some other program be using a Lightroom catalog ?

Another thing is that I am storing my Imported pics in E drive rather than default C drive so I may have ended up making a Catalog on this drive itself, is there a way to scan whole of computer for Catalogs stored somewhere else?

 

[Big Mike]

If you go to the first drop down menu (I think it's 'catalog' or 'Lightroom') there should be an option for 'open recent...' where it would list the previous catalogs that you've had open.

If that doesn't work, you can search your system for *.lcat and that will turn up any catalogs on your computer.

 

[psran]

Got my answer.

Actually I had to go to Folder location and remove a folder lightroom4. lock and my Catalog was open to be used again.

Thanks for all your efforts

 

[KmH]

A key to using LR's image database management system is understanding your catalog is never in LR.

LR keeps track of where in your computer's memory the catalog is found.

 

[psran]

A key to using LR's image database management system is understanding your catalog is never in LR.

LR keeps track of where in your computer's memory the catalog is found.

I knew it is stored in a folder in C drive by default. The problem was that I had made a new Catalog without properly closing the first one so as a Safety measure LR locks the catalog by making a new folder with .lock extension besides the .Ircat catalog extension. One would be able to open this catalog only once this .lock file has been deleted