About once a week I get an email from a Lightroom user who has lost a panel … most panels can go missing, but in my experience people seem to lose their Catalog panel in the Library module more than any other. To recover your missing panel, right-click (Ctl-click on a Mac) on the name of an existing panel in the same strip (Mac users: Ctl-click to the left of the panel name), and choose the panel you are missing, from the drop-down that appears.

In this example, my Catalog panel is missing. I right-clicked on Folders to get the menu. I would then select Catalog, and the panel would appear.

Note that there are some panels that are not optional, and therefore you cannot right-click on them to restore your missing one. These are:

• Navigator and Histogram in Library and Develop
• Navigator in Map
• Preview in Book, Slideshow, Print and Web

In this menu that appears that you can also choose:

• Show or Hide All. (If you’re not sure what you are missing Show All would be a good choice to make sure you have everything.)
• Solo Mode: when enabled, if you expand one panel, any others open will collapse.
• Expand All and Collapse All

Thank you to Stephano B. for this blog post idea.

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