Inspiring

Question

Catalog intermittently loses connection to photos

Forum|Forum|29 days ago
June 23, 2026
3 replies
46 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

Conrad_C

Community Expert

Working that way should normally be very reliable. Over the years I’ve used a succession of external hard drives and SSDs as the primary storage for photos linked to my Lightroom Classic catalog, and rarely have a problem.

Some of this might be redundant with what dj_paige already posted, but if I saw frequent question marks I would troubleshoot along these lines:

When it happens, do you also see macOS displaying a “Disk Not Ejected Properly” message like in the picture below? If you see that, the problem is outside Lightroom Classic and has something to do with the Mac’s connection to the external drive. For example, it could be a bad cable or a bad enclosure; try switching those to see if they’re the problem.

It’s always best to solve this by re-linking the files, not re-importing. Re-linking means showing Lightroom Classic where they are. If many images are missing, the most efficient way to re-link is to to go to the Folders panel and select the highest level folder that shows missing images. Right-click that folder and choose Update Folder Location or Find Missing Folder. (If right-click is not enabled on your Mac, Control-click instead.)

The big problem with re-importing is that does not update anything, it acts as if the imported images are new. Any work you previously did is not restored, such as hours of edits you made, or metadata you entered. So re-importing is inefficient, and highly destructive because you lose your past work done on the same images. Whenever possible, it’s always preferable to re-establish broken links instead.

martyk12345Author

Inspiring

Hi Conrad. Thanks for your response. I too have never had a problem before while using external hard drives for many years. My catalog is on my computer, backups on the external drive and never an issue. If I hadn’t just bought a new hard drive and just moved all my pictures from the old to the new then I would also be looking at other solutions. The problem is that the files on the new hard drive are missing today, but they were there yesterday when I created a larger collection from several days of shooting in the same geographic area and combining them into one. Last night I worked on all these pictures and they were there. This morning - gone.

I did try relinking pictures with the catalog before I opened the hard drive directory and saw the pictures were just gone from the hard drive, so when they’re gone relinking can’t work. I’ve never had pictures just disappear. I’m running a full scan on the hard drive, but it will take hours. The shorter scans came back and reported no problems. The pictures that are missing are in fact contiguous even though I have them organized differently in my collection. I have scheduled a call with a B&H techie for tomorrow. I suspect possibly bad sectors on the hard drive.

Sadly, while reimporting is a pain and a loss of editing time, it so far appears to be the best solution. Fixing broken links only work when the picture is still there.

I really appreciate you taking the time to think about this.

Marty

martyk12345Author

Inspiring

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

Legend

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.

martyk12345Author

Inspiring

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

Legend

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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