Lost Photos after Updating Photo Location

I had accidentally imported photos of 4 separate basketball games that occured in January2026 into my December 2025 subfolder of my 2025 main folder.  Using "Update Folder Location" I successfully moved them to my 2026 main folder, but on that folder was a small black circle with an exclamation point in it, which reveals a message that says "subfolder(s) are missing in this folder, please relink..."  I right-clicked on that folder and did not see any "relink" option, so I clicked on synchronize folder" and those photos promptly dissapeared! 

 

By @Morris in MT

The first thing to know is that the "Update Folder Location" option does not MOVE images from old to new location. It simply changes (updates) the catalog reference for all the images that are in the folder from the old location folder (December 2025) to the new location folder (January2026). It does not move the images at all, as it assumes that the images have already been copied to the new location, so when it finds that the images are not in that new location they are all flagged as "missing". At that point the situation would have been recoverable (simply copying the images outside LrC to the correct location would have resolved all those "missing" indicators). Unfortunately, using Synchronize Folder was not the way to go.

This is a screenshot of the standard Synchronize Folder panel:

As you can see there is an option to have LrC remove all missing photos from the folder that is being synchronized, and that is checked by default. If you did not uncheck that option (and it appears that you didn't) then when you clicked on the Synchronize button all the "missing" images would have been immediately removed from the catalog. Which probably explains what happened.

@dj_paige is right....the images should still be on the system, in fact they should still exist in the old December2025 location (as Update Folder Location does not remove them). Find them there, and reimport them (but you will have lost any edits or metadata that had been added to the images, unless you had saved metadata to those images before the Update Folder Location procedure).

Synchronize folder never fixes these exclamation point icon or question mark icon problems. You were fine until you did that.

Please search your catalog file for these photos, following all four of these steps.

1. Click on All Photographs (its on the left under Catalog)
2. Turn off all filters (Ctrl-L once or twice)
3. Expand All Stacks (Photo->Stacking->Expand All Stacks)
4. In the Filter Bar, search for a photo by File name

If you can't find them, it may be because synchronize has removed the photos from the catalog. In that case you will have to start over.

If possible, please correct your title to indicate that you lost the photos after synchronizing folders.