A number of the photographers that I assist in private one-on-one Adobe Photoshop Lightroom technical support sessions have been reporting a similar error message lately. Each of these clients reports receiving an error message that says that their Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Catalog “cannot be opened because it is too new to be used by this version of Lightroom.” Usually this error message appears a few day after installing a Photoshop Lightroom update or upgrading from an older version of the Lightroom application.
Fortunately, there is a quick and easy solution to this problem. If you encounter this error message on startup then all that you need to do is to tell your computer to open this Lightroom Catalog (your .lrcat file) using the most recently installed version of the Lightroom Application.
In the Mac world, this is best done by right-clicking on your .lrcat file and using the Open With command. Windows users will find the same command with a right-click although so far I have mostly seen this error on computer’s running the Mac operating system. See the video tutorial above for more assistance resolving this issue.