Lightroom pics missing!!

futureal33

futureal33

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Nick
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Afternoon all,

I have just cut all of my photos off my internal hard drive onto a different internal hard drive. When opening Lightroom, it is saying "the file named xxxxxx is missing" - which is what I would have expected it would say!

Can anyone tell me how I tell it to look on drive A/Lightroom rather than B/Lightroom so that it will find all my photos again?

The folder structure is identical, its just that it is looking on the wrong drive

Ps - I know about the "locate" option, but this only does one photo or one folder at a time (and I have literally hundreds of folders!

Thanks for any help :)
 
All sorted now :D
Lightroom is great program - bloody clever!!

I basically had 2 copies of my photos, and 2 catalogue files. I opened the old catalogue with the new photo library and it auto detected that my develop settings were mis-aligned, then asked if I wanted to import the metadata, develop settings and tags etc - I said yes, it went away for about 15 minutes and when finished it was back to normal - but with all my photos on the correct hard drive and with all develop settings re applied :)
 
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You can add the parent folders to the right menu then click on that and locate missing folder. You'll want to do that before you move them next time. Then just re point LR when you've moved the files.

V
 
Ahhh im going insane lol.. Its not sorted :(

Its made 2, sometimes 3 copies of each photo now!!

And to top things off, it wont let me remove them from my library!
Without sounding stupid... when I select all photos, hit the "del" button - it should give me the "delete from disk" or "remove photo" options right? Well its not giving me either :(

Im stuck, I cant seem to delete the photos out of my lib, and re-import them? Help!
 
Neil, tried that mate and no luck.

I have no idea what Ive done - the whole lot is messed up.

I still have my original RAW files safe and secure stored elsewhere, ready to be re-imported back in....but I cant clear my library now to get all this stuff out of it, ready for the files to be brough back in - any ideas? It wont let me delete them lol
 
Have to say that I think Lightroom's catalogue management is a big weak point. Really doesn't make itself straighforward to backup/restore/migrate.
 
Actually lightroom is marvelous at cataloging, it's just that people don't read the manual. Always move the folders within lightroom, that way lightroom modifies the links, pointers etc that are associated with that image.

Mind you - I think that most people who use lightroom have made this mistake once.

Your metadata is stored in your catalogue file you've opened. Are you sure you've open the right one. Don't forget you have backup catalogues you can revert to if you've completely screwed up.

Depending on how far you've got, it might be worth moving the files back, opening a backup catalogue file (taking a copy of the current one) and starting again.

The only problem with lightroom is that you can only move one folder at a time. I presume this was done for safety, or if you haven't enough space and it errors, but it's a pain when moving say a years worth of photos.

Jullianne Kost does some great training videos. This one may help: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/adobe-evangelists-julieanne-kost/moving-files-in-lightroom-and-the-finder/

This also may be useful: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr_tracking_files/locate-lost-files.htm
 
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Ok, so real scenario here : I have Lightroom on my laptop with all my photos on it.

I want to migrate that Lightroom installation onto my new desktop.

The image files will be on a different drive/folder on the desktop.

How do I do this?

Is there some easy way to copy the catalogue and say, this folder tree is now in a different location?
 
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