Can I tell Organizer (2023) that I don't care about missing images?

Question

If some images go missing in a folder that I have under management by Organizer, Organizer gets very upset and wants to reconnect a missing image when I go to examine the image in the image browser, and it won't leave me alone about the problem. It tries scanning the drive for the image and nagging me to tell it where the image went, etc. And then it gets rather unhappy for a while and behaves annoyingly.

This is a huge nuisance for me. For my particular use case, I'm perfectly happy to tell Organizer to completely forget about such missing images and to just forget that they ever existed. Or to let them just remain disconnected, as long as I can easily delete the image browser entry in Organizer to that image. Is there a way for me to accomplish one of these two choices? I.e., to get rid of the scanning, nagging, and breaking that Organizer wants to do by default?

To proactively address potential responses asserting that I don't really want what I've asked for:

I completely understand that there are use cases where losing the connection between an image and Organizer's database could be tragic, so I'm not saying that I think Organizer's desire to reconnect images is misguided, etc. I just personally require different behavior for my particular use case.

"Why are these files going missing?" you might ask. The answer is that I have a complex workflow that involves using other tools, and sometimes those other tools want to delete images. This is all fine with me. I use Organizer specifically for scanning through lots of images and deciding which ones I want to keep and which ones I want to delete. I also might rate the images with stars indicating how much I like them. But if another tool in my toolchain ended up deleting the image that's fine with me, and I just want to be able to tell Organizer that it's fine with me that the image is missing and to forget about that image.

P.S. The other tools I'm using are perfectly okay if an image goes missing. E.g., when I delete an image using Organizer, they just end up forgetting about the image, which is exactly what I want. So I'm not asking for some crazy feature. Other software is able to recover from this situation in the way that I would like. Unfortunately, they don't do some things well that Organizer does do very well.

douglasa48459168 · Accepted Answer

It's unclear to me whether you still want to have a broken thumbnail available in the Organizer after you have deleted the file from your computer (or moved it) using your other software.

I'm perfectly happy to have the broken thumbnails just be just completely gone.

If you no longer need the thumbnail for the deleted file, you can select and delete the missing file(s) with the Delete key, either individually or using multi-selection tools such as Shift-Click or Ctrl-click.

I don't think that this will work for me since I'm typically reviewing images in the "Full Screen" mode. (The viewing mode that will double as a slide show.) When it hits a missing file in this view, there is no (obvious) option to tell it to stop searching for the missing file, other than to escape out of this view altogether. When you escape out, it's difficult to find where you were in the thumbnail gallery, since Organizer doesn't seem to keep track of where you were in the Full Screen view.

You can also easily find and delete all missing files by using the Find>All Missing Files menu choice, wait for the grid to populate, hit Ctrl+A to select them all and then Delete them.

Ah, yes, that works. Thanks!

Though it looks like I'll have to be very careful about "version sets". When I use Find > All Missing Files, the search results grid ends up containing version sets where any file in the version set is missing. If I just blithely delete everything in the search results, it can end up deleting some actual files that I might like to keep. I don't want to do that!

Unless there's a better way, I'll have to carefully look at the thumbnails in the search results for the version set icon, and deal with those thumbnails first, before mass deleting the rest.

Greg_S. · Answer

@douglasa48459168 said:I'm typically reviewing images in the "Full Screen" mode. (The viewing mode that will double as a slide show.) When it hits a missing file in this view, there is no (obvious) option to tell it to stop searching for the missing file, other than to escape out of this view altogether.How about viewing the photos in Single Image View? (Double-click on an image in the media grid so that only one image is displayed.)  If you scroll through your images in this view and come across a missing file, the reconnect dialog will disappear if you hit the Esc key.  You can then hit the Delete key and press the Enter key.  Three keystrokes and problem solved?  Scrolling through the grid in the Single Image View would also avoid the problem with Version Sets since you can quickly scroll through the grid and the missing files will be the only ones where the reconnect dialog will appear.

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