Bulk renaming files

You contradict yourself. First you say “And they are not in LR”, but further down in your message you then say “I can use the “find file” dialog in LR and rename them individually”. If you can do that, then they are in Lightroom. The situation is most likely as ​@gary_sc and ​@Rob_Cullen have explained. The images were copied to the same directory on import, and so your OS added ‘-2’ to the name because two files in the same folder cannot have the same name. Maybe they were moved to another folder later, so you do not see them if you look at the folder that contains the original images. They are somewhere on your disk however, and these ‘-2’ images are the ones Lightroom has catalogued.

DO NOT RENAME THEM OUTSIDE OF LIGHTROOM. Either rename them using the ‘Rename Files’ function in Lightroom itself, or simply ignore this. Why is their name so important anyway? You can still find them in Lightroom (otherwise you would not have asked the question here), they are not ‘missing’ in Lightroom (you can’t rename a missing image in Lightroom), so there is no real problem with these images, except that you probably want to clear up space and delete the images that Lightroom does not use.

​@Tim of the older variety  I might disagree with the renaming advice from ​@jrsforums .  If you have imported photos using ‘Move’ or ‘Copy’ as suggested by ​@gary_sc  then the -2 files will most likely be those that are indexed in the LrC catalog. Rename with the operating system will immediately make them all “Missing” in the catalog- more troubles to contend with.

You need to investigate further to know which of the files are in the catalog (the Original or the -2). Only then should you consider which files to delete.

Renaming the files (dropping the -2) is easy.  For Windows, us the ‘Bulk Rename Utility’ (free Google it).  Mac probably has similar.  Finding or getting them (moving) to the correct folders will depend on how many places they need to be…only you can answer that.

This is not LRC doing this, I regret to say it’s probably you are causing it and your compture is making sure you do not overwrite your own files.

Actually, this happened to a very good friend of mine and he had the very same question. For his case, he would have a folder of images, and when Importing into LRC, he selected Move. This inadvernently made a copy into the same folder it was in, and since the OS cannot accidentally delete the original, it made a copy and that is always appended at -2, -3, etc. If he had selected “Add,” this would have been fine and no extra images would have been created. 

LRC doesn’t care where the files are located: on your computer, a flash drive, an external hard drive, etc. (Cloud drives, not so much, but YMMV). When you “Add” files, LRC knows where the file is and it’s happy. When you Move files, and you do not intentionally move them to a different location, LRC just moves a copy to where the file is currently located.

FWIW, I always have a specifc master folder with all of my images. That way, I have to make a concience effort to make sure I Move or Copy (actually I always Copy as DNG) to my master folder.

I hope all this makes sense, it took my friend a bit of time to wrap his head around this. But he’s not had any issues since then.

Good luck!