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I had about 500 images that I worked on and thought I'd finished with for now.So I moved them to another drive and renamed them,but now I need to work on them again from the same catalogue.
I can't remember the original file name so when I open that catalogue again it says 'The file could not be found'.Can I find out the exact file names etc again so I can go back in without having to start from scratch again?
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Take a look here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/
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Does the catalog show the (I assume now missing) original file name? If so you can use either a temporary catalog or external file renaming program to change the new names back. Or you can reconnect missing files, possibly one at a time, but it's faster than renaming one at a time.
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Thanks for the answer.
Sorry but I should have said I only renamed the folder they were in and not the original images,all image file names are unchanged.Unless I've over looked the VERY obvious,how can I get the catalogue to show me the original file name?
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So I moved them to another drive and renamed them
IMPORTANT LESSON: don't do that. Better to rename and move from inside of Lightroom Classic, and then you won't have these problems. Or better yet, get out of the habit of moving photos around entirely.
If you still have the un-renamed photos on your camera card, the easiest thing to do would be to (using your operating system) copy the photos from the camera card to the folder where they were stored when you edited them.
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Thanks for the answer.
I only renamed the folders and not the files inside them and then moved them to an internal storage drive as I was running out of room on the main system drive,a relatively low capacity SSD.
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Do not put photos on a disk that has little space and then you have to move them later. A simpler approach is to put them in their final location (a disk that has more space) straight out of the camera.
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I didn't notice the system drive was almost full until I went to export the JPEGs to it when it ran out of room.I put them on there first as it's quite a bit quicker than the SATA drives used for storage,then moved them to the storage drives.I normally import using the camera's generic file and folder numbering system and changed the name of the folder with the RAW files in it when I'd moved it.Something happened along the way to blur my memory and after changing it more than once I couldn't remember what it was originally called.Now the catalogue can't find the original RAW files.
Since this happened (it was a few months ago) I put everything on the storage drive that has over 1 Tb of space on it and work on it from there.
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Speed of a drive (and speed of the connection of the drive) is almost irrelevant to Lightroom Classic. You will never notice the hundredths of a second difference caused by a slow drive.
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It makes a big difference in my particular case,mainly when I import them onto my PC from the memory card.
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If there's a big difference, it is not because of the speed of the disk (unless there's some severe malfunction)
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The speed of my drives really isn't relevant here.I just need the catalogue to tell me what the missing file is called and nothing else.I rename it and it works again.
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Take a look here: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/
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This helped thanks everyone!