P: Add 'Missing Photo' Status to Grid Filter Bar and Smart Collections.

Please add 'Missing Photo' Status to Grid Filter Bar and Smart Collections.

Catalogs are now getting larger, as Lightroom matures and catalogs naturally expand. Also, cameras with fast frame rates are becoming the norm.

Finding Missing Photos can be an extremely useful feature, but only results in a single potentially large collection. There is no feature currently within Lr to export a list of filenames/paths of missing photos.

I have tried using various Plug-Ins... but the plug-ins I use do not provide reliable lists. Also plugins were extremely slow and took up to 36 hours to generate lists based on a 700k catalog.

Please make it possible to be able to filter images based on their 'Missing Photo Status' and also create smart collections using a 'Missing Photo Status'. 

Background Example.

I have assisted a photographer with a catalog of 700k images.. spread over 3 x 12TB images. One of the drives failed, with a loss of 330k images. Backups were incomplete.

I recovered the drive using a combination of hardware and software recovery techniques. To do a QC of the resultant recovered disk I needed to get a list of the paths of all missing images from the drive in question.

I could then compare the files recovered to the list of files and check specifically what files were missing, before reinstalling the recovered drive back into the photographers system.

I resorted to the following.

 I analysed the Catalog SQLite tables using various tools available. Determined that I needed to export the data from 5 tables to effectively analyse and find the missing images. Import the exported data into an Access database and build a series of queries to link the tables to find the file paths of all the missing images. I filtered the 700k images selecting only images from the damaged drive. This reduced the list to 8k  images. I exported this list to Excel and created a pivot table summary, with folders as the main first column and file types as column headings, counting the number of missing images per folder and file type. The analysis showed that 95% of the missing images were from 2 folders. This was of enormous benefit to the photographer. Further, I was assured that I had recovered 322k missing images and could proceed to install the recovered drive.  My approach meant that missing images in the catalog could be successfully linked to the actual images on the newly constructed disk and all metadata and flags preserved.

The extract of the data took approc 5 mins and running the Access queries on this data took between 5 and 10 mins. This is a lot better than 36 hours.

I now have a set of tools I can use in future for a) troubleshooting missing images in large catalogs b) A tool I can use in future for extracting metadata of my choice and automating several of my most frequent workflows. I would prefer to do this within the Lr app, but must resort to using external tools if Adobe do not provide the basic feature requested.

I think that the evolving population of Lr users , with ever increasing catalog sizes, will benefit from having the ability to filter missing images using existing Lr tools (ie filter bar and smart collections). An absolute ideal outcome would be a report, which summarised missing image counts in a table with folders in the first column and file types in the other columns (but I would be happy with just exposing the 'Missing Photo Status' to the Grid Metadata Filter Bar and Smart Collections).