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martyk12345
martyk12345
Inspiring
June 23, 2026
Question

Catalog intermittently loses connection to photos

  • June 23, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 0 views

I run LrC 15.3 om a Mac Powerbook. I purchased a new WD 24TB hard drive when my old 12TB filed up, and moved my photo files to it. I also just returned from a trip where I imported several thousand pictures as well. When all migrating and importing was done, the catalog seemed happy. All pictures were recognized. Since then, pretty much every day for the last four days when I open a collection a number of pictures have the dreaded exclamation point indicating that the picture can’t be found. For the past three of those four days I’ve reimported those pictures from a 2TB travel drive and reedit the pictures. Yesterday evenoing all was well. This morning I have the same problem. I haven’t moved to 15.4 because I didn’t want to compound my problems with a new catalog and new version. Any thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Marty

    2 replies

    martyk12345
    martyk12345Author
    Inspiring
    June 23, 2026

    I did try reestablishing the connection but the resulting dialog box doesn’t display the original though when I look in my all photographs folder it’s there. At some point I can click on the picture to reestablish the connection and I get the message that the picture is associated with another picture and can’t be linked. Most of the other pictures in the collection are recognized so if the problem was a poor connection or a sleeping drive I wouldn’t be able to see any of them. This problem has started since I moved to the new drive, but why would 39 or 40 pictures, not contiguous, out of 350 in a collection lose their connection?

    I originally imported from a Crucial 2TB drive and have a Samsung 2TB drive as a backup which is where I get the pictures that have lost their catalog link. Generally I would’t reimport, but that so far has seemed the best way to recover my missing pictures.

    Marty

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    June 23, 2026

    At some point I can click on the picture to reestablish the connection and I get the message that the picture is associated with another picture and can’t be linked.

     

    Yes this is because you have re-imported the photo, and so you can no longer re-connect the photo in LrC.

     

    This problem has started since I moved to the new drive, but why would 39 or 40 pictures, not contiguous, out of 350 in a collection lose their connection?

     

    Perhaps the hard disk is malfunctioning in a given sector or part of the disk. You should run diagnostics on this hard disk.

     

    Please address my comment about the CFExpress card.

    martyk12345
    martyk12345Author
    Inspiring
    June 23, 2026

    I don’t think the reimporting is the problem since I get to delete the old and reconnect the new in the catalog. Furthermore ,the lost links happens to different pictures each time.

     

    You may be on to something with bad blocks on the hard drive. I was about to run diagnostics and call WD.

     

    The CF Express card gets uploaded to the Crucial hard drive each night and reformatted. I backup the Crucial drive to another hard drive as well. I also cull each night once the pictures are uploaded to the hard drive. SOmetimes I get the message that the picture is not on the new WD drive, but I can find it in the All Photographs folder.

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    June 23, 2026

    Reimporting is not the solution (in fact it almost never is the solution). If you click on the exclamation point you will have the option to reconnect LrC to the actual location of the photo.

     

    Is it possible that the photos are on a CFExpress card and you imported using ADD, which means LrC will look for the photos on the CFExpress card and if the CFExpress card is not longer connected it won’t find the photos? (The solution is to then import using COPY, not ADD).

     

    Is it possible that this new WD 24TB is “going to sleep”, which will cause the symptoms you have.

     

    Is it possible that the physical connection between the drive and the computer is intermittent, so sometimes the drive appears to be unavailable and photos are missing, and then other times the connection is fine and everything works? Sometimes jostling the wire can cause this.

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