Help Please! Lightroom lost link to photos. Can relink them individually but not together.

Question

Okay so this is a really strange issue with some history.

I have my catalog and photos stored on a portable drive. I use it at home (PC) and at school (Mac). The school has about a year old version of Lightroom Classic. Whenever I open them at school, all photos show the "photo missing" exclamation mark. I redirect them to the folder again either by updating folder location or usually by clicking on one of the exclamation marks, hitting find missing photo, and then checking the checkbox to find nearby photos. This works and relinks all photos that are contanied within the same folder on the external hard drive.

Then when I get back home, I have to do the same thing all over again, as my PC no longer sees the link to whatever photos I successfully accessed from the school computer.

This time however, when I returned home and tried to relink the photos on my PC, it is only seeing the one photo I click the exclamation mark on, and not finding nearby photos. So my only option is to click each individual photo and relink them, for over 750 photos.

Has anyone else come across this issue and found a solution? I've tried updating the folder location. I've tried restarting Lightroom, optimizing the catalog, and restarting the computer.

Thank you for reading!

Edit: I think I got it to finally find the photos. I just kept renaming the folder outside of Lightroom and pointing it back to it until it just decided to work. Any idea how to prevent this in the future? I didn't always have this problem with the external drive but it's all the time now.

JohanElzenga · Accepted Answer

The problem is that Macs use a disk name and Windows uses a drive letter. Because Lightroom uses a 'path' to the images like this Disk/Folder/Image, you will always see missing images when you switch between Mac and Windows. Changing drive letters on your PC won't help.

Do not try to 'reconnect' individual images. Go to the folder panel and you will see that the folders are also missing. Reconnect the top folder as described in the link that Wobert gave you. All subfolders and all images in those folders will be reconnected all at once.

JohanElzenga · Answer

There is one permanent solution, although I have seen mixed messages about how well it works:

If you store the images inside (a folder in) the catalog folder, then Lightroom will use a 'relative link'. Such a link refers to the catalog folder, and so it does not contain a disk name or a drive letter. As a result, you should not see missing images when you switch from Mac to PC or vice versa.

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