I'm on a pc using Lightroom classic. For some reason all of a sudden Lightroom stopped recognizing folders on my hard drive. I have hundreds of folders but its only showing one. How do I get it to see all the folders?

Forum|Forum|3 days ago
September 6, 2026
19 replies
126 views

I use an external hard drive for my photos. Lightroom won’t show me the folders in that drive anymore. It used too. I’m only seeing 1 folder now.

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DesertBighorn

Participant

I’m having the same symptoms as the OP. I probably have a 100 folders, but only a couple are showing up. I just noticed that when I launch (I use Creative Cloud) that I’m on v15 and my catalog still shows v13-3. Could I have missed upgrading? Can I force an upgrade? When I choose a v13 catalog from v15 LRC I don’t get prompted to upgrade.

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

No, that has nothing to do with it. Lightroom Classic does not rename the catalog anymore when it upgrades it. If you use Lightroom Classic 15, then your catalog is also upgraded to version 15, even if the catalog name still says v13-3. There is now a Rename Catalog menu to fix that if you want to fix it.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

I noticed that you just joined the LightroomQueen forums and posted the same question there, but you give different information. In that forum you say you use Lightroom Classic on two computers (a laptop and a desktop), and this happened when you moved the external drive to the desktop after having last used it on the laptop. You do not say if you use the same catalog on both computers.

So in the interest of clarity, explain in detail what the setup is that you use and what happened at what moment.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

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Scott_Fernandes6985Author

Participating Frequently

Sorry, didn’t mean to confuse things. Yes, I do go between the two. The catalogs are the same. I did change the drive from windows selected to dedicated as “S” today as recommended by califdan2 on this thread. But the problem started before that. I used to have a USB splitter that I would plug multiple external hard drives into but yesterday I just plugged this one into the computer. That’s when I noticed not all the files were showing.

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Scott_Fernandes6985Author

Participating Frequently

I also added a new folder yesterday and that’s the second folder that I see now. Yesterday It was only 1 folder.

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Scott_Fernandes6985Author

Participating Frequently

It’s showing the new drive S but I still only see 2 folders with subfolders under them. I’m still missing a few folders with all of the subfolder in them.

Califdan2

Inspiring

Windows probably changed your drive letter last time you logged on. This can happen if you have more or fewer USB devices plugged in than you did before. For LrC, you need to lock in a drive letter (use letters in the 2nd half of the alphabet like “P”) so that it won’t change between Windows sessions.

Here is a link to a Microsoft document telling you how to assign a permanent letter to a drive
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/disk-management/change-a-drive-letter

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Scott_Fernandes6985Author

Participating Frequently

I changed the drive letter. How do I get Lightroom to recognize the new drive letter?

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