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DClark064
DClark064
Inspiring
May 7, 2026
Question

Locate missing folder and locate nearby files does not work

  • May 7, 2026
  • 2 replies
  • 33 views

I used the Win11 OS to move a large number of files and a few subfolders from a folder to a folder of the same name on another drive.  The receiving folder already had a large number of files in it.  After the transfer was complete, LrC showed the folder and the files were missing.  I clicked to locate the folder, navigated to the receiving folder and selected to merge.  Nothing happened.  LrC was using about 4% of cpu, but after a couple of hours no files or folders had been relocated.  I then tried locate one the small subfolders (they contained a couple of hundred jpegs) and they were quickly found and LrC moved them to the new folder. There were 5 subfolders and I moved them one at a time to the new folder.  I then tried locating a single file in the folder with the option to find nearby files selected.  It found the single file, but none of the nearby files.  

 

It may be that LrC is failing because of the large number of files that were moved (~25K).  Is there an upper limit?  It may also be that the need to merge the old folder into the new folder is the issue.  Does that work properly?  Does merge have an upper limit for the number of files?  Regardless I have about 25K files that I cannot get LrC to locate.  

    2 replies

    DClark064
    DClark064Author
    Inspiring
    May 7, 2026

    I discovered that LrC was locked up.  Although it was using only ~4% of cpu LrC was locked up.  After ~5 hours it completed the relocation of the folder and LrC is operational again.  It seems that LrC takes a huge amount of time to complete the merge.  It took longer for LrC to relocate the files and merge the folder than it took Win11 to copy the files from a fast SSD to a much slower HDD.    During the ~5 hours there was no status indicating it was working on the task.

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    May 7, 2026

    I haven’t had any such experience, reconnecting whole folders in Lightroom Classic after doing the move/copy in the OS goes very fast. I think the problems was Find Nearby Files, which I can see would be very slow if you have humongous numbers of files in a folder with no subfolders.

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    May 7, 2026

    I don’t think there is a limit in terms on the number of files you can move, relocate or merge. There have been reports through the years that when you perform LrC functions on large number of files, LrC seems to come to a stop and doesn’t resume. Whether or not this is what happened to you, I can’t say.

     

    I think a possible problem is that when you have a huge number of files in a single folder with no subfolders, the OS slows down noticeably, and since LrC uses OS calls for accessing files, and so therefore LrC slows down. LrC has to rely on the OS to search the huge folder to find “nearby” files, and that could take a huge amount of time. Having a huge number of files in a folder with no subfolders is not recommended.

     

    Reading your original explanation of what you did — “I used the Win11 OS to move a large number of files and a few subfolders from a folder to a folder of the same name on another drive.” — may I ask why you are not just relocating the folders, instead of trying to relocate files?

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