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B
BG Phillips
Participant
January 19, 2017
Question

LR no longer recognizing photos/folders on HD

  • January 19, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 479 views

So, I have a 2TB external HD that I've been using for all my images for 2016. All have been imported into Lightroom. For 2017, I bought another (larger) external HD and I COPIED (not moved) all of the 2016 images/folders into the newer external HD as a backup. So, the original RAW files are still on the 2016 HD, unchanged, but now when I open LR to edit or view those photos, it no longer recognizes them as being there, forcing me to re-import them (thus losing all of my editing changes on thousands of photos). I can understand why LR would not recognize the images if I had moved them, but I didn't. I merely copied them to another drive, while leaving the original drive untouched. So why does LR no longer recognize the images on that drive? Using LR CC. I use one catalog for everything.

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2 replies

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
January 19, 2017

Importing is totally the wrong thing to do and has made the problem worse. If I were you, I would delete the newly imported versions of your photos from Lightroom, but not from the hard disk, to get back to where you were previously. IMPORTANT CONCEPT: Never re-import photos.

The link given above by McLion is the way to fix the problem; alternatively you can fix the drive letter/drive name problem that caused this; if you are on Windows, all you hve to do is set the drive letter of the old external HD back to the letter it was previously.

B
BG PhillipsAuthor
Participant
January 20, 2017

I don't recall what the drive letter was previously (I'm on Windows), but currently the new HD I bought for 2017 photos is labled F: while the one I had the problem with is named G: Perhaps Windows re-named the drive letter on its own? I haven't had this issue come up before and I have multiple external hard drives that I will plug in via the USB ports, depending on which selection of older images I'm trying to access at any given time. I went ahead and re-imported these prior to these answers being posted. I can live with that, as most of them have been saved as JPEGs after the editing changes. It's just that I've lost the editing changes to the RAW/DNG files. Not sure how to reverse my current import... Thanks for the response. I will have to watch this for any future hard drives that I use.

A
amas2
Participant
January 20, 2017

Do not use driveletters for external drives in Lightroom - to avoid such problems use drivepaths.

F. McLion
Community Expert
F. McLionCommunity Expert
Community Expert
January 19, 2017

Are you on Mac or Windows?

Does the new drive have a different drive letter or mounting point?

Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

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