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Michael5C44
Participant
October 5, 2020
Answered

Light Room

  • October 5, 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 580 views

I want to return to the original photo I already edited in Light Room, and give it some tweaks.  I can find it in Light Room but it is greyed-out.  The error message says it is a duplicate of a photo already in the catalog.  After I edited the photo, I moved all my original photos onto different hard drives, so the computer is probably unable to find them.  The option of finding the photo with the little exclamation point is not offered for this particular photo.  I can't make sense of opening the catalogs.  Also, I seem to have both Light Room CC and Light Room Classic on my PC.  I think I edited this photo on CC.  Any tips as to how to proceed?  I'm also unable to re-import it.
Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer JP Hess

Although this is the Camera Raw forum, I will try to respond to your question. When you moved the images did you do so using Lightroom or did you use File Explorer or Finder (Mac)? If you used one of those two utilities then Lightroom no longer knows where the images are located. Lightroom only opens the catalog, which is a database. And that catalog keeps track of where the images are located. All activity needs to be coordinated within that catalog in order for everything to function properly. The reason you cannot import again is because the catalog has a record of the image even though Lightroom doesn't know where the image is located. Perhaps the following documents will point you in the right direction of realigning those images:

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/

3 replies

TheDigitalDog
TheDigitalDog
Inspiring
November 30, 2022

Also see:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/confused-about-lost-images/m-p/13383515#M301031

Discussion and fix for 'missing photos". 

Any and everything you'd want to do in the Finder/File Explorer (move, rename, delete, etc) you can and should do in LR. Otherwise, you are doing things behind its back, it has no idea what you've done. When you do this within LR, it 'knows' and updates the catalog of these changes. 

Author “Color Management for Photographers" & "Photoshop CC Color Management/pluralsight"
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G Ã Yåâr27370754xb1i
Participant
November 30, 2022
  1.  
JP Hess
JP HessCorrect answer
Inspiring
October 6, 2020

Although this is the Camera Raw forum, I will try to respond to your question. When you moved the images did you do so using Lightroom or did you use File Explorer or Finder (Mac)? If you used one of those two utilities then Lightroom no longer knows where the images are located. Lightroom only opens the catalog, which is a database. And that catalog keeps track of where the images are located. All activity needs to be coordinated within that catalog in order for everything to function properly. The reason you cannot import again is because the catalog has a record of the image even though Lightroom doesn't know where the image is located. Perhaps the following documents will point you in the right direction of realigning those images:

http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/

M
Michael5C44Author
Participant
October 7, 2020
Ok, thank you.
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