Trying to re-associate photos in Lightroom with a different drive

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Yesterday my Western Digital external hard drive crashed. I have tried retrieving data via several different methods, and come up empty. Following yesterday crash, I'm now working on rebuilding my Lightroom galleries from galleries still on memory cards. Most of these galleries are filled with already-edited photos.

The external drive that crashed was JKP Passport 1. So images in Lightroom that were associated with images on that drive now understandably show up as missing.

I am reimporting images from my memory cards and want to associate them with the newly created folders on my new drive, JKP Passport 2. But when I try to associate these images, I am told they are already associated with another photo in the catalog and can only be associated with one photo. They are associated with images on a drive I cannot access, however.

Can anyone help me? I don't want to lose the edits I have already done. Thank you!

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kentdesign

Community Expert

Did you have a back up drive of both the Lightroom catalog and the photo files themselves?

If you did, all you need to do is copy the catalog and photo files from the backup drive to the new drive.

What do you mean by galleries still on memory cards with already edited photos?

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Jao vdL

Community Expert

To rephrase the advise already given: What you want to do is to basically recreate the file structure on your dead hard drive. You want to manually copy the files from your memory cards onto the new hard drive (so DON't use Lightroom to do this but just go through finder/explorer!) and put them in the same structure as you can see in Lightroom. Then you do a find missing folder on the top level directory/folder and everything will fall in place.

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Jessica5CECAuthor

Participant

I did recreate the folder structure from my dead hard drive onto my new hard drive. My mistake, it seems, was to import those images via Lightroom, rather than just copying the images directly from the memory cards - is that correct?

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dj_paige

Legend

Importing the photos is a mistake. You need to tell Lightroom Classic to look for the photos in the folders on the new hard drive. I gave a link to the instructions to do this earlier in this thread.

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dj_paige

Legend

Importing is 100% the wrong thing, to do. Put the photos from the memory cards on your new hard disk. If possible, put them in the exact same named folder as they were in before the crash. The proper method(s) to reconnect the photos to your Lightroom Classic catalog is given in this document.

Also don't you have backups of the photos in the original folder hierarchy? Then your task would be much much easier.

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