External Drive File Structure Messed Up

[18ShadesOfGrey]

I was looking in Lightroom for photos I had taken of a wedding in 8/2023 but couldn't find them. I did locate them on my external harddrive where i store my photos, under a folder of the wedding name, I always import my photos directly into Lightroom CC so I figured that somehow I must of deleted the folder in LR. I went ahead and reimported them. I then created a new folder in LR CC with the name of the folder then went to import the photos. As it started I realized it was importing thousands of photos, but should just have been hundreds. I stopped the import. For some reason two other folders were then empty and the photos were mixed in with the wedding photos.

I opened a backup LR catalog from yesterday and it looked fine but those two other folders didn't have any photos. Looking on my harddrive using Finder I see a bunch of files from a different trips/events in the wedding folder that are a combination of photos and side car files. I don't think I lost any of the photos (and I do have backups) but I don't know how the Mac file structure got messed up.

My photos are named to match the folder, such as 20220501_New-York_001.NEF so I can figure out how to manually move the various files to the correct folders, but I don't know if Lightroom will then be able to match everything up. Help!

[18ShadesOfGrey · Accepted solution]

I ended up removing the files in the affected folders and reimporting from a backup. That seems to have fix everything, though I'm still not sure what caused the problem.