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Pam26450742lgz7
Participating Frequently
October 5, 2022
Question

External hard drive

  • October 5, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 475 views

 I download all my photos to an external hard drive and then loan into LR from the harddrive so they are just added to LR.  my external drive crashed (no back up of that drive) but I still have some photos on my camera card.  I have LR set up so that it does not load a picture twice.  Is it going to be a problem to reimport those same photos into LR?  Any thoughts on this matter is appreciated.  

 

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1 reply

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
October 5, 2022

If the photos are no longer available on the crashed hard disk, but you have SOME of them on the camera card, you would not re-import these photos. (Re-importing is almost always the wrong thing to do, it fixes nothing, and often makes the problem worse). 

 

You need to copy these photos from the camera card to your internal HD (or any other disk you have that works) using your operating system (not using Lightroom Classic). Then you tell LrC where to find these photos so that the catalog recognizes them and so that LrC uses the editing information and metadata in the catalog with the photos you just copied. Complete instructions are here: https://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

P
Pam26450742lgz7Author
Participating Frequently
October 5, 2022
On the pictures that were added that can no longer be accessed, what is the
best way to delete them from LR?....the ones showing that they cannot be
found with a ? cause they were on the external hard drive. I'd like to get
rid of seeing them in LR.
dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
October 5, 2022

First, fix the ones that you still have on your camera card. The rest can be deleted as follows:

 

  1. Library->Find All Missing Photos
  2. Select all of them (Ctrl-A)
  3. Delete them (backspace key)
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