External hard drive

[Pam26450742lgz7]

 I download all my photos to an external hard drive and then loan into LR from the harddrive so they are just added to LR.  my external drive crashed (no back up of that drive) but I still have some photos on my camera card.  I have LR set up so that it does not load a picture twice.  Is it going to be a problem to reimport those same photos into LR?  Any thoughts on this matter is appreciated.  

[dj_paige]

If the photos are no longer available on the crashed hard disk, but you have SOME of them on the camera card, you would not re-import these photos. (Re-importing is almost always the wrong thing to do, it fixes nothing, and often makes the problem worse). 

You need to copy these photos from the camera card to your internal HD (or any other disk you have that works) using your operating system (not using Lightroom Classic). Then you tell LrC where to find these photos so that the catalog recognizes them and so that LrC uses the editing information and metadata in the catalog with the photos you just copied. Complete instructions are here: https://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

[Pam26450742lgz7]

On the pictures that were added that can no longer be accessed, what is the
best way to delete them from LR?....the ones showing that they cannot be
found with a ? cause they were on the external hard drive. I'd like to get
rid of seeing them in LR.

[dj_paige]

First, fix the ones that you still have on your camera card. The rest can be deleted as follows:

1. Library->Find All Missing Photos
2. Select all of them (Ctrl-A)
3. Delete them (backspace key)

[Pam26450742lgz7]

ok thank you. If I had set this up to import and build a smart
preview....would I have been able to get back the images that were on my
external drive?

[Theresa J]

If you had smart previews you would be able to export a decent size image. You would not "get back" the originals lost on the failed drive.

[Pam26450742lgz7]

Have another question.  I have purchased two external hard drives and want to use one as a backup to 1st hard drive.  REason is I recently had my external hard drive go bad and lost all those images.  So is there a proper way to do the second drive so that....should my 1st drive go bad again, I can pop in the second drive and be able to see all those pictures and to also be able to see them after they were adjusted?  

I popped in the second drive just to see.  It of course did not recognize or was able to find my pictures. I did the find pictures and referenced the second drive.....but none of my previous adjustments that I made using drive 1 was there.  I had to start all over with edits again.  

[dj_paige]

If you plug in the second disk, and LrC does not recognize them, all you have to do is tell LrC to look on the second disk — assuming the folder hierarchy and location of the photos is identical on each disk. On Windows you can change the drive letter of the 2nd disk to match the drive letter of the first disk. On Mac (I'm not a Mac user, I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong) all you have to do is rename the second disk to be exactly the same name as the first disk.

I popped in the second drive just to see. It of course did not recognize or was able to find my pictures. I did the find pictures and referenced the second drive.....but none of my previous adjustments that I made using drive 1 was there. I had to start all over with edits again.  

Not necessary if you follow the above instructions. Never re-import. That's NEVER, no matter how bad you want to do it, do not re-import. Then, you have to start all over with editing again.

[Pam26450742lgz7]

That works for me. Thank you.

Another question:. I sometimes will color code first the ones I like and
then go back through them with a rating. In some folders when I rate these
the picture gets put at the front end of all the pictures which makes me
have to go back to where I left off and begin rating the ones left that
were color coded. It's weird because it does NOT do this every time I have
a new selection of pictures. It only does this once every so often and I
cannot figure out why or how to correct it. I do the exact same thing each
time I import. I do NOT want it to sort according to the rating but again
cannot figure out why it does this sometimes?