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Question

Lightroom catalog and missing images problem

Forum|Forum|16 years ago
March 31, 2010
9 replies
31615 views

I'm having a weird problem. Any ideas how to fix it?

As I did synchronize folder to my catalog in Library view, Lightroom says I have 1898 images missing. If I select any of those "missing images", Lightroom acts perfectly normally, and I can do anything to that image. If I select Show in finder, any image is located exactly where Lightroom thinks it should be. So actually it's not a missing image, Lightroom only thinks it is.

Also, synchronize folder wants to (re?)import those "missing images". I don't dare to do it because I'm afraid I lose all edits and collection data. Although Save metadata to images seems to work, so missing edits probably is not a problem.

And if I go to Photos Missing From Folder "2009" in catalog tab, Lightroom shows all "missing photos" normally. None of them e.g. has missing photo badge (question mark symbol) in them, and I can edit or export any or all images normally.

I'm a bit afraid what now.

Is my Lightroom catalog falling a part? Is my harddrive failing?

Some info:

My Images are in USB hard drive.
My catalog is macbook hard drive.

Most images are NEF.

OS: Mac Os X 10.5.8 (macbook)
Lightroom: 2.6

Total number of images in Lightroom: 33013
Images in synchronized folder: 6337
missing images: 1898

This topic has been closed for replies.

J

johnn2578879

Participant

This problem appears to have multiple causes. If so there is likely to be no single fix. I assume that for the case below the source photo files aer alredy in thethe desired directories but it's the link with LR which has sonehow been lost.

However, a quick solution which worked for me and should work for some - at least in Win10. Note that - unless sidecar files are available, it's likely that any corrections made in Lightroom will be lost.

1. Take a back up copy of the source files which have disappeared from the Lightroom Catalog

2. Rename the folders concerned in Lightroom

3. Import the files that have disappeared from the catalog in the normal way from the directories in which they have been loaded (using Add) , with "Do not import duplicates" unticked. This should bring the files back into the right directories

4. Within Lightroom, drag and drop any photos which were not lost but live in the renamed folders into the correct folders and "Remove" renamed folder (these photos should bring the information on corrections with them)

Best wishes and good luck... and it would be lovely if Adobe could provide a proper explanation of the ways in which this problem arises and a full set of solutions.

M

markus.kallander

Participant

I seem to get this problem with directory names containing the "ö" character (probably "å" and "ä" as well). Looks like it is working with "Ö" though. Weird. Lightroom 5.

E

essahar

Participant

I had the same or a similar issue whith many folders in my catalog are showing with the question mark which mean that folder are missing however if I go to one photo I can edit it in LR 6.1. The fix for me was very easy just renamed one of the missing folder then right click on the old one in the catalog and update location. then magically all question marks disappeared from other folder

S

Sammy_70

Participating Frequently

Essahar trick worked perfectly for me !

Thanks a lot for sharing it !!!

S

sergii

Participant

This issue has been around for quite some time. I found a "fix" that worked on my machine although I cannot guarantee it will help other people.

So the setup I had is similar to the one mentioned in original post:

Pictures: located on external HDD connected through USB

Catalog: located on internal drive

Symptoms

1. If I import the pictures from some location on external HDD it appears at the root of the catalog, not in the location I specified during the import.

2. When clicking on "synchronize folder" for folders that existed in my catalog before I have a dialog that shows NNN pictures missing and exactly NNN pictures ready to be imported

3. Clicking "Reveal in Finder" takes me to the correct location

4. Clicking "Library -> Find all missing photos" shows 0 missing photos

5. Reverting the catalog from an "uncorrupted" backup doesn't help

What helped in my case

1. Start the Lightroom with your external drive connected

2. Check that the issue is still there by clicking "synchronize" on one of old folders and seeing obscure numbers like e.g. 760 photos missing 762 photos to be imported

3. Go to Finder and eject your external hard drive

4. All the pictures that were on external drive should now be marked as missing in Lightroom

5. Reconnect your external drive

6. Ligthroom should recognize it immediately and all the pictures are no longer missing

7. Check that the issue is gone by clicking "synchronize" on one of old folders and seeing reasonable numbers like e.g. 0 photos missing, 2 photos to be imported

Hope that helps.

Since I'm not sure how adobe forum notifications work, I'll mention some people from this thread in this message

inhathanh, lr101, flowerdealer, MatthewTurley, freemind42

T

tokurvin

Participant

Wow,

This so worked for me as well. I was already ready to toss LR and try to cope with Aperture (which is far better in many areas but lacking in others), but now I can give LR another chance...

Thank you so much!

BR. Toni

M

MatthewTurley

Participating Frequently

I just had the same problem in LR3 and had me equally concerned since it was in my main database with over 100K images. In my case I tracked it down to the fact that I had changed some of the root folders' capitalization (i.e. 'Photos' to 'photos'). I did the folder renaming within LR, and it was still tracking all of the images successfully (like you said - there was no missing file symbol, and editing, exporting, and 'show in finder' all still worked). Just seems that some of the catalog systems never got the memo...

I fixed it by renaming the folders back their the original name, but appending a temporary character (so the program would see the rename as more than just a capitalization change*), followed by a secondary rename to the desired lowercase name. !Et voila!

Not sure if this will help your exact situation, but it could be related. Hopefully you've found a solution by now

*a tedious workaround I've learned is necessary when making capitalization changes in Finder, which must be only 'semi' case-sensitive...

E

eacasta

Participant

I have the same problem Did any of you find a solution? In my case it is related with accentuated characters, as I explain here: http://forums.adobe.com/message/5337560#5337560

Any help would be appreciated.

C

chi_spots

Participant

I'm having the same problem with LR 5. I guess they never fixed the issue.

F

freemind42

Participating Frequently

Same problem here: Photos get shown as "missing" but when I rightclick on "Show in Finder" they are where they are supposed to be. Have a German LR3 but no Umlaute (ö,ä, ü) in my folders/images/descriptions.

Seems like bug. Would be nice if someone from Adobe could confirm it.

D

dachan

Participant

Hi, I have the same problem. LR says I am missing 3325 photos from my 2010 folder which has 4565 photos. it says on the "catalog" section 'missing photos from folder 2010'. I tried changing the folder 2010 to say 1910 and when I restart LR, it still shows missing photos from folder 2010. which is weird because I dont have folder 2010 anymore. Any suggestions? Thanks

jgblair

Participating Frequently

dachan,

Did you change the name of the folder inside of LR or outside of LR? Anytime you make changes to the folder structure or naming outside of LR, LR has no way of knowing what you did until you relink it, so it is usually best to change things inside LR.

John

John G. Blair Studio

D

dachan

Participant

Hi John,

Initially when I found out about the problem, I changed the folder name inside LR. Then restarted LR but it still showed photos missing from the "old folder" after renaming it. what I did wasI made a new catalogue and imported from the old catalogue. It messed up some of the order of my files though.

dennis

T

TTWebiFried

Participant

Edit>Preferences>Import

Make sure the check box for "Treat JPEG files next to RAW files as Seperate photos" is checked. I had the same problem after setting this to import from my camera so I didn't see both the jpg and the raw files on the camera. I sync'd my collection, noticed more than 1300 missing files, could explore to them, could manipulate them, then realized that setting. Reset it, re-sync'd and the files were no longer missing...

Downside was that now I have a whole bunch of dng's and raw files that state the sidecar file is missing, although it's a quick click on the '?' and it resolves but leaves the filename.dng+jpg in the filename ...

Check please ...

TT

Art by JLM

Participating Frequently

Thank you! Fixed my problems of 'missing' JPGs next to DNGs

K

KKujaAuthor

Participating Frequently

When I synchronized one folder, which contained 97 images, which are all "missing images", Lightroom says:

"some import operations were not performed.

The files already exist in the catalog."

And as result I get empty duplicate folder in folder view.

Any ideas how I could fix this? I optimized catalog, but that changed nothing.

Also, same problem with backup catalogs... >:(

K

KKujaAuthor

Participating Frequently

Curiouser and curiouser!

I converted one of those missing 97 missing images to DNG and conversion went OK. (remove original, don't embed original RAW file.)

After that I synchronized that folder and again LR said there were 97 missing images. Although this time LR imported the DNG file and now I have two identically named folders in LR. Original folder contains 97 images (including DNG, which LR still thinks is missing) and other folder only contains the DNG file (Which was just imported, so it's not missing.).

I don't understand...

Edit: (I also tried selecting all images and then export as catalog, but problem persisted with new catalog).

K

KKujaAuthor

Participating Frequently

Now I'm actually a bit afraid.

I selected Synchronize folder to my root folder in Lightroom, just to see how much images LR thinks I'm missing.

LR said there are 27420 new images (correct figure is probably something like 2000)
and continued there are 10718 missing images... (every missing image I checked works, I can edit and export them, and show in finder shows correct image, so none of them seem to be really missing.)

There are now 35220 images in my library and that's probably also the number of images in my folder structure.

What can I do?

This shows well what I hate in Lightroom. When one notices that catalog file is corrupted, backups may not help because roots of corruption may be too far a way.

Saving metadata to files may help somewhat, but there is always some information that cannot be saved to files.

Thank god I have used collections mainly on temporary basis, because now it really seems that collections should not be used to really organise images, because collection data really cannot be backuped.

Sorry if this seem to turn to a bit bitter, but I'd just like to get my database fixed and working again. I don't dare to work with obviously broken database, although it seems to work to some extent.

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