Detailed information, and maybe eventually scripts to work with the Lightroom Catalog file

The file is a SQLite database, and can be opened without modification by any SQLite tool. The command line tools work well, DB Browser for SQLite also works well.

The file itself can be quite large, mine (amateur photographer) is ~189MB.

The database contains numerous tables. This document shall attempt to indicate their purpose, and other key information.

Messing up your lightroom catalog is a fantastic way to start from scratch. Back it up multiple places, never edit the file while Lightroom is open.

After installing SQLite, you can open the file with the .open command, giving it the filename of your Lightroom Catalog, for me that's .open "Lightroom Catalog.lrcat". You need to quote the filename as there's a space in it.

Pauls-MBP-1675:Lightroom paulreinheimer$ /usr/local/opt/sqlite/bin/sqlite3 SQLite version 3.34.0 2020-12-01 16:14:00 Enter ".help" for usage hints. Connected to a transient in-memory database. Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database. sqlite> .open "Lightroom Catalog.lrcat"

SQLite can give you a list of tables using the .tables command.

There are 111 tables in the database as of Lightroom Classic 8.4.1 They are:

This table stores details about the various "root" folders for your Lightroom catalog. All folders within AgLibraryFolder will identify one of these as being a root folder, and store their path relative to this root.

CREATE TABLE AgLibraryRootFolder (
    id_local INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    id_global UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    absolutePath UNIQUE NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    name NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    relativePathFromCatalog
)

This table identifies every folder that contains images in your Lightroom catalog. The rootFolder item refers to the id_local from the AgLibraryRootFolder table. pathFromRoot shows the path from the root folder to the image.

CREATE TABLE AgLibraryFolder (
    id_local INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
    id_global UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    pathFromRoot NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
    rootFolder INTEGER NOT NULL DEFAULT 0
)