missing photos in my catalog

Hi Gina,

One piece of good news is that your photos are NOT lost. It's just that for some reason they did not apparently update with the catalog. 

Couple of questions: (What format are these images (raw, jpg)?

Do you have thumbnails for these images with an exclamation point (!) on the thumbnail and when you click on that it says the orginal images are missing?

Here's the big one: how do you keep ALL your photos? That is, are they randomly distributed across your computer's hard drive (and are some of them placed on external drives) or are they always placed within one folder. (FWIW, I always recommend the latter approach as it becomes easier to deal with situations like these. The former can also be dealt with, it's just a tad more work otherwise.

One last question just so I know what we're dealing with here: What is your OS and what release?

Thanks for answering these questions, it'll be easier to know what I'm dealing with to help you. 

Sounds like Lightroom upgraded the wrong catalog, namely an older one. Perhaps it upgraded a backup copy? Look in your Pictures folder for a Lightroom folder and then look for files with a .lrcat extension. Those are catalog files. You can also use the search function in the Finder to look for them.