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Participant
September 9, 2017
Answered

Lightroom not finding missing photos that I know are there

  • September 9, 2017
  • 3 replies
  • 1364 views

A while ago, I had to move a bunch of picture folders from my C: drive to my 😧 drive, not realizing at the time that I could have done it through LR itself.

I'm trying to reconnect the "missing" folders with their current actual locations.  Unfortunately, when I search for the first photo in a folder, it will only show me a few pictures from that folder, and none of them are of the missing photo itself.  I was afraid that a recent major problem I had with LR6 refusing to start up at all had inadvertently deleted some of my photos, but when I searched through my regular directory system, the photos are all there, but LR isn't finding them.

I would try to restore whole folders, but one that I tried to do that way didn't restore all the pictures in the folder and I couldn't undo the process.

Help???

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer ManiacJoe

If you moved a folder tree from one drive to another drive, you need to go to the Folders panel and fix the missing folders before you try to fix the missing files. LR knows the difference between files in missing folders and missing files.

Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

3 replies

Participant
July 25, 2018

This same situation is happening to me but the finding missing folders is not helping. 400ish photos out of 800 in a folder are missing in Lightroom but all photos are intact on my desktop with the other files that are showing up in Lightroom. When I click the ! icon and search for the file it is telling me that the "file is associated with another photo in the catalog". That process keeps repeating if I attempt to show Lightroom where the file is.

Someone help! I'm in the middle of a huge job and all the files I have editing won't "connect" so I can export them.

ManiacJoe
ManiacJoeCorrect answer
Inspiring
September 9, 2017

If you moved a folder tree from one drive to another drive, you need to go to the Folders panel and fix the missing folders before you try to fix the missing files. LR knows the difference between files in missing folders and missing files.

Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

Participant
September 10, 2017

Thanks. I'll try that 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

Abambo
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 9, 2017

tamin79505104  wrote

but when I searched through my regular directory system, the photos are all there, but LR isn't finding them.

I suppose that the pictures are no more in the Lr Database?

Or are they shown with an "!" on the picture icon?

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer
Participant
September 9, 2017

They have the !, but the previews are missing because of the fix Adobe support had to do to my LR to get it running again. Because I have so many photos (20K+), there are numbering duplicates, so when I'm trying to locate photos, I have to be very careful that the image number also goes with the proper folder. 

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.

Abambo
Community Expert
Community Expert
September 9, 2017

numbering duplicates means that the file names are the same? But they are in different directories?

Could you paste a screen shot of your current situation?

ABAMBO | Hard- and Software Engineer | Photographer