Participant

Question

Imported Photos Now Missing From Desktop Folder — LrC Says Originals Not Found

Forum|Forum|8 months ago
June 26, 2025
3 commentaire
602 vue

Until this evening, I had 12,000 photos of my recent trip to Tanzania on Lightroom Classic. When I initially imported them, for some reason they imported to a folder on my desktop. However, I decided to go with this and have been editing without any issues. Today, when I went to edit some more images, it turns out that 11,000 of my photos now have missing originals. When I tried to locate them, LRC told me that the photos were in the folder on my desktop. However, most of the files have disappeared from that folder. For example, for one date when I have almost 3,000 thumbnails, there are only two remaining files in the folder for that date.

I don't know if this is an issue with LRC or with my imac, but the original files can't have just disappeared into thin air. Or can they?? Obviously, I am desperate to get them back!

macOS

mauitouch

Participant

Did you ever get your photos back? I am in the same boat and still can't find my photos. I had them in folders on desktop, put the individual folders in one folder to clean up desktop and they are all gone. I went through adobe and they did not find them. I guess I need a forensic computer whiz to find them, if they are still in my computer.

dj_paige

Legend

Did you ever get your photos back? I am in the same boat and still can't find my photos. I had them in folders on desktop, put the individual folders in one folder to clean up desktop and they are all gone. I went through adobe and they did not find them. I guess I need a forensic computer whiz to find them, if they are still in my computer.

@mauitouch It would be much more helpful if you started a new thread and explained your problem in detail, emphasis on “in detail”, from the beginning.

mauitouch

Participant

Ok, thank you, I will do that.

AxelMatt

Community Expert

I have never heard of Lightroom deleting original files unless you explicitly do so. This is very unusual and suggests a hardware error.

Check your hard drive if it's faulty.

Do you find the files in the trash? Are the files moved to another folder ion the disk?

Is there a log file (like the event logs in Windows) where you can take a look what happens?

In Windows, it is not recommended to store large amounts of data on the desktop. I'm not so familiar with MacOS if there it's the same.

Do you've a backup of your files?

My System: Intel i7-8700K - 64GB RAM - NVidia Geforce RTX 3060 - Windows 11 Pro 25H2 -- LR-Classic 15 - Photoshop 27 - Nik Collection 8 - PureRAW 6 - Topaz Photo AI

uklizjAuteur

Participant

Thank you so much for your response.

I've searched everywhere for them.I even did a search for some of the specific image file numbers and got nothing, so I feel as if they are truly gone.

I know that I really should be keeping them on an external disk but I am not very computer literate and am terrified about losing them (and all that work) if I move them. I don't even know where my other originals from Lightroom are stored! And until a few years ago, I was using Photos on my mac, and would have no idea how to merge all of those photos on an external disk.

Everything else on my mac seems to be fine. It seems only to have affected those images and I still have about 1000 of them in the folder, which makes me think that it might be a storage issue.

I have plenty of room on my desktop. I am wondering now if it is an icloud storage issue? When I first uploaded the photos to Lightroom, there were about 16,000 of them and I got a message that my icloud storage was nearly full. Since then, however, I have deleted about 5,000 (who needs 30 images of the same bird in the same pose on the same tree?) and have not had that icloud message again so I assumed that the icloud storage issue had been resolved.

I use Time Machine and can hopefully restore the photos from an older back up. I'm thinking of increasing my icloud storage to the next level (which will, unfortunately, cost me $40 a month, rather than the $10 I am paying now) at least to try and see if that will resolve the issue. Also I am so paranoid about losing photos (especially those taken during a once-in-a-lifetime trip) that I tend to copy, rather than move my images when I import them, so the images *should* still be on my SD cards, unless I accidentally moved them instead. I think I will buy an external drive and re-import them to there and hope I can figure out the rest later.

So, I'm not entirely panicking, but wondered if there was an easier fix (is there ever?) rather than having to go to a lot of extra expense and time (I will probably have to delete thousands of images again, although hopefully not re-edit!). Also, these other fixes are just "if"s and I have no guarantee that they will solve the problem.

Anyway, I really appreciate your time in replying to me.

Thanka again,

Liz

CMass

Community Manager

Hey @uklizj,

I can appreciate how stressful your situation is, and I hope that the help from @AxelMatt & @JohanElzenga helped point you in the right direction. Photography is an beautiful way to capture the world around us, but the Digital Asset Management part can be overwhelming. Let u know how things go. Also, check out The DAM Book 3.0, which is a more recent version of a book I've used to help guide me through my own DAM (Digital Asset Management) journey. 😅

^CM

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

Is your Desktop folder synced to iCloud? If so, iCloud may have offloaded them to cloud only to save space on your Mac. Lightroom cannot deal with cloud only photos however.

-- Johan W. Elzenga

uklizjAuteur

Participant

Thank you for your reply. My desktop is linked to icloud but there doesn't seem to be a thumbnail or any other marker than I can click on to bring them back, if that's where they are!

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