The question is why did I lose all my editing and what can I do to get it back?

Question

When I was on the form before a week or so I was of the understanding I did not have enough free space so I purchased a new 500 GB SSD for my computer and a new 2TB Ext HD to put my photos on. MY Original ext HD was 1TB and I had only 10% free so I think it was causing the problems with LR Classic. MY computer SSD drive was 250GB with about 70GB free. I moved all my photos and the LR files to the new 2TB hard drive which took 17 Hrs. When went to use the new drive I had to import all my photos into LR again and when I did that I clicked 1:1 previews( Problem). The import process was not to bad but making the previews was a 3 day process (24 hours x 3=72 Hrs). During the process LR would work and then say not working for the last 24 hours of the 72 hours. The question is why did I lose all my editing and what can I do to get it back? I have a total of 31782 photos. My color labels and stars also do not show up. I am using Lightroom Classic. The problems I was having with LR before were in a earlier form. Those problems have not showed up But I have not worked on LR that much because I lose all my editing. I would like to get the editing back before I start the process of reediting them all again.

Charlie Bassett

JohanElzenga · Accepted Answer

What you need to do is let Lightroom know what the new location of the images is. If you reimport them, Lightroom thinks they are new images, so that is not the way. So start with the original catalog again.

Right-click on the top folder of the old disk in the Lightroom folder panel. You'll get a contextual menu. Depending on whether the old drive is connected or not, you will either see a menu 'Update Folder Location', or 'Find Missing Folder'. Choose that and you'll get a standard 'open' dialog box. Use it to navigate to the folder on the new disk and select it. That will 'reconnect' the folder and all its subfolders, so that Lightroom knows its new location. If you have more than one single top folder, you'll have to repeat this for each of them.

JohanElzenga · Answer

You say you had to import all your photos again, but you should not have. It sounds like you did not copy your Lightroom catalog to the new drive, but instead let Lightroom create a brand new one. That is why you lost your edits, because edits are stored in the catalog. If you still have access to the backup, restore the Lightroom catalog and start with that.

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