Participating Frequently

P: No photos in selected folder (Mac)

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
February 20, 2023
66 replies
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I have over 60,000 images on an external hard drive. Today when I opened Lightroom and tried to navigate to a recent image using the Navigator Panel, the folders and subfolders are all showing the numbers of photos inside the folder, but when I click on a subfolder it says "No photos in the selected Folder". When I check the Finder they are there. If I go to the highest level of parent folder on that external drive all 60,000 images are showing at that level and I can scroll through them. But when I drill down to any lower level that the very highest, they are not there. I have not done any moving of files or folders in the last several months and up until today everything was working fine. I have not installed any new plugins or done anything out of the ordinary with Lightroom recently. Any idea why this is happening and more importantly how I can fix it? I've included a couple of screenshots to show what I'm talking about.

macOS

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Abigail28583633n332

Participating Frequently

Thanks, Sean. I will try this tomorrow when my brain is more in gear.

Sent from my iPad
Abigail Gossage
abigail@abigailgossage.ca

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DavePinMinn

Inspiring

I had an interesting experience today with a friend’s Lightroom Catalog. This was all done by Zoom, so I could see her Lightroom, and can verify most of what seems to be happening…

Few month old Mac of some sort, recently updated to LR 12.2.

A while back, she used a 6TB external HDD for her images. A couple months ago she switched to a 12TB external HDD.

The 6TB was “named” “Gdrive for Photos”.

The 12 TB was also “named” “Gdrive for Photos”.

Not sure if this is meaningful in Mac-world or not.

She SAYS she doesn’t remember COPYING anything from the 6TB drive to the 12 TB drive. I don't SEE any of the folders that are on the OLD Gdrive for Photos in the NEW Gdrive for photos. There DON'T appear to be any duplicate months - at least none that I saw. So she may NOT have copied the 62,000 images on the old Gdrive to the new one. She for SURE didn't Move them in Lightroom.

Her organization is something named “Volumes” (or possibly Volume), inside of that is the NEW Gdrive for Photos with years inside that and months inside that.

Then the SECOND, OLD, Gdrive for Photos with Years and months inside that.

So in Lightroom, she suddenly had TWO “folders”, both named “Gdrive for Photos”, but the system worked. She insists that she could work normally in EITHER of those “folders”. One had 62,000 images (the OLD, 6TB one), and the other (NEW 12TB) had 8000 images.

BUT, there was only one, actual, PHYSICAL, 12TB external HDD plugged into Lightroom. She still insists she could see all the images in EVERY folder, could open images, manipulate them, and everything worked fine. I'm not sure HOW this was possible, but she SAYS it worked.

THEN she updated to Lightroom 12.2. And suddenly she can’t see ANY images in ANY folder. There are NO question marks, no errors, NOTHING unusual. You can see in old Gdrive there’s a 2022 with February. And you can see that February has 33 images. BUT if you SELECT February, Lightroom says there are NO images.

The NEW Gdrive ALSO has a 2022, but NO February. But you can go do 2022 in the new Gdrive and click on July, and get the same response from Lightroom. No images.

Library filter is off, everything else I could think of was done to try to see images. Can't create a folder in the old Gdrive, or import into a folder or delete images or remove a folder. She CAN import into folders in the NEW Gdrive folder tree.

If you look in a folder that has images in it in the NEW Gdrive (it has the be the MOST RECENT import), you can do a "Go to folder in library" and it DOESN'T go to the folder into which the images were imported, it goes to the "Volumes" (or Volume) folder. THAT folder, in Lightroom CAN SEE all 70,000+ images, but NO child folder of Volumes can - no errors, no question marks no 0 counts, just not workiing.

Checking physically, in the “Volumes>Images” folder there IS a single folder structure that contains all the images. So there’s a 2022 folder in which there’s February, in which there are images. The images are there and safe, but Lightroom doesn’t see them.

She CAN import new images, but you can’t remove a folder, you can’t delete images, you basically can’t DO anything in Lightroom.

After a couple hours of trying everything I could think of, I told her it LOOKED like some kind of corruption.

Went into the Library filter and Metadata Status and resolved the conflicts, mismatches, and unknowns on a couple thousand of the 70,000 images, made sure all the metadata had been written, and had her create a NEW catalog in a NEW location.

She then imported all her images (or is currently importing), and hopefully things will work.

SO, A REALLY LONG EXPLANATION to ask a simple question… This is a Mac, with which I’m not real familiar. The OLD catalog is safe, just sitting there. Is there ANY way y’all can think of that I’ve likely MISSED, that would enable us to get the OLD catalog with all her collections and stuff working again? Or, is it just time to learn from the mistake and move on with the new catalog?

GoldingD

Legend

Perhaps a summary that you can correct

Photos originally on an external hard drive named "Gdrive for Photos". This was a 6TB drive
Owner installed a new external hard drive, also named "Gdrive for Photos". This is a 12TB drive
You do not think the photos were coped from the original drive to the new drive
In LrC, the Folders panel shows two volumes named "Gdrive for Photos"
One column shows some photos the other none

inquiry:

Are both external hard drives still connected?

assumption:

MACOS should not allow duplicate drive names. So the author renamed the new drive after removing the old one.
And if not, then duplicate drive names will cause issues.

additional assumption

Owner did not copy photos from original hard drive to new hard drive
Both hard drives were connected with LrC running at one point

additional inquiry

Are the photos in the grid view showing an ! mark top right of thumbnail?
Are the folders showing an ? mark

https://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

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DavePinMinn

Inspiring

She doesn't think she copied the photos from the old drive to the new one. And in Lightroom, the old drive has 62,000 images, the new one has 8000, and they don't APPEAR to have images in the same months on both drives.

It doesn't LOOK to me like she copied images.

She doesn't THINK she's EVER had both drives connected at the same time, BUT I suspect she did at SOME point. Then disconnected the old drive.

In LrC, the Folders panel shows two volumes named "Gdrive for Photos"

Yes, there are 2 Gdrive for Photos "drives", BUT only the new one is connected.

One column shows some photos the other none

Both Gdrives show data, but only the new one has had images imported to is since plugging in. The new drive doesn't appear to have images from the old drive

The ONLY place that could actually SEE images was "Volumes" - it sees all 70,000 images.

There were a couple thousand images with "!" marks - metadata conflicts or mismatches. I updated all those before creating the new catalog.

NOBODY had/has a question mark - Lightroom doesn't think ANYTHING is missing.

Sean McCormack

Community Expert

@Abigail28583633n332

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/lightroom-displays-same-hard-drive-twice.html

Sean McCormack. Author of 'Essential Development 3'. Magazine Writer. Former Official Fuji X-Photographer.

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Abigail28583633n332

Participating Frequently

The problem is that the drive shows up twice and neither iteration has all the folders and sub folders in it. The green drives are floating by themselves and not where they should be.

Sent from my iPad
Abigail Gossage
abigail@abigailgossage.ca

Sean McCormack

Community Expert

Green beside a drive means they're connected and have plenty of storage available.

Sean McCormack. Author of 'Essential Development 3'. Magazine Writer. Former Official Fuji X-Photographer.

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Abigail28583633n332

Participating Frequently

Another problem as fallout from doing a rollback to v12.1: Now I have two drives that have a green icon next to them. I suspect this indicates they are online which I do not want. How do I fix this?

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markjhnoob

Participant

Same problem. Logged in another forum (https://community.adobe.com/t5/lightroom-classic-discussions/no-folders-in-selected-folder/m-p/13609456). As requested, system details are as follows :

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro11,5

Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 4

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 6 MB

Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

Memory: 16 GB

System Firmware Version: 476.0.0.0.0

OS Loader Version: 540.120.3~22

SMC Version (system): 2.30f2

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andrel46615190

Participating Frequently

Bonjour à tous. Je souhaite vous faire part d'un problème concernant Lightroom. Depuis la dernière mise à jour, les photos de mon catalogue stockées sur mon NAS n'apparaissent plus ! Elles sont toujours sur le disque dur, le dossier sur LR indique bien le nombre de photos présentes, mais la fenêtre d'affichage indique laconiquement "Aucune photo dans la sélection de dossier". Je suis complètement désemparé. Si jamais quelqu'un d'entre vous a une idée, je lui vouerai une reconnaissance éternelle 😉 D'avance merci.

kind_Hero1587

Participating Frequently

Bonjour,

La seule idée qui me vienne, bien cela ne correspond pas parfaitement au cas de figure que vous évoquez, serait la désactivation de la ligne « Afficher les photos dans les sous-dossiers » (Menu Bibliothèque)… Je suis arrivé au même type d'affichage que celui que vous avez illustré et je pense que cela vaut, au moins, la peine de vérifier (i. e. d'essayer).

Bien cordialement,

Balliet JM

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andrel46615190

Participating Frequently

Bonjour, et merci pour le tuyau.

Malheureusement, il est sans effet...

Je pense que je suis bon pour recréer une bibliothèque, mais avec 1000 000 photos, cela va prendre du temps 😕😕

chrisnavarrophoto

Participant

Hi! So basically this is what’s going on. I’ve been working with Lightroom for years and now that I updated the last version it says this message NO PHOTOS IN SELECTED FOLDER when I know I have photos in those folders plus I can see there is the total number of images in the folders but somehow they don’t show up. I checked the hardisks and they work fine.

Hope I can find a solution for this asap.

Thanks,

Chris

johnrellis

Genius

There have been a couple other reports about this. Initial troubleshooting steps:

1. Please post a full-resolution screenshot (not a phone pic) of the entire LR window showing the problem.

2. Do the LR menu command Help > System Info and copy/paste the entire contents here so we can see exactly which versions of hardware and software LR thinks you're running.