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R
Reepicheep7
Participant
April 5, 2025
Question

Missing images after transferring from Desktop to Portable Drive

  • April 5, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 445 views

I tried transfering my images from my desktop to a portable drive.

About 3600 images, using Import from Desktop to Portable drive, I let it do its thing all night.

Checked this morning (viewing the Portable drive on my laptop) nothing there.

So I decided to drag the folders (inside lightroom) to the new drive (it would only let me "Move" them).

It did nothing with the exception of erasing my images.

Is there anything I can do?

Lightroom Classic 13.3.1 release

 

Thanks

1 reply

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 5, 2025

Not sure I understand what you did exactly. It sounds like you reimported already existing images into Classic and pointed the import to the folder on your internal drive where those images were? If so that would indeed not lead to anything imported as those images are already in the catalog and the default action is to not import already existing images. You can circumvent that by unchecking the "do not import suspected duplicates" option but this really is NOT the way to move images. It inevitably leads to loss of edits.

 

The best way to move images to another drive is to move them in Explorer/Finder by copying them to the other drive. Then inside Lightroom CLassic, you right-click on the top-most folder in the hierarchy you moved and select "Update folder location" and now point at the corresponding folder on the external. Check that the folder now shows up listed on the other drive in the left bar in Classic and that all images are there and now you can delete the folder on your internal drive.

Here is a visual guide: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/move-photos-another-hard-drive-leaving-catalog/ - use option 2.

 

You can also do the move inside Lightroom but many consider this less safe than using the operating system's native file browser.

 

If all your images are really gone now from both locations, you should restore from your backup that you hopefully have.

R
Reepicheep7Author
Participant
April 5, 2025

Thanks for responding.

Yes you are correct the images that I tried to import did nothing, however, the images and pre existing folders were still intact at this point. No harm no foul. I still have my images.

 

I wanted my images on the portable drive so from the left pane in lightroom, I drug the from my local drive (C) to the folder on the (G) portable drive. It told me they would be "moved". To that I OK'd.

I knew that I would lose any changes in lightroom I had done, but that would be fine. I just wanted the images on the portable drive. In the upper left corner the horizontal blue bar showed that lightroom was performing the task.

After it had finished the process I shut down lightroom and safely removed the portable drive.

I connected the portable drive to my laptop, nothing had been moved.

Took the portable harddrive (2tb ssd) back to my desk top neither drive has the images at this point and I have the dreaded "?" on all the thumbnails.

Does this clearify my actions?

Thanks

J
Community Expert
Jao vdLCommunity Expert
Community Expert
April 5, 2025

You did it the correct way and your images are likely still there. Just check the drive in explorer. Using this method (which is method one in the link) you WILL retain all edits as those are stored inside the catalog. What likely has happened is that moving the drive back and forth between computers has changed the drive letter and now Lightroom doesn't know where to look for them. You want to probably give it a fixed drive letter at some point which I think (I am not a windows user) is possible. For now just right click the top folder in the left bar in Lightroom Classic and update the folder location to point to the correct location with the correct drive letter. It should rediscover the images and not show the question marks anymore. This changing drive letter thing is a common problem for windows Lightroom Classic users.

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