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First, I cannot open your (or anyone's) file attachments. So if you want to provide information, make screen captures and include the screen captures by clicking on the "Insert Photos" icon.
Looking at the table and the second attached file "LR-Catalog-v13-3-2.pdf", my first question is this: The catalog "Lightroom Catalog-v13-3-2.lrcat" seems to contain only a few folders, while its size indicates that there should be more. I suspect that not all content is shown. Is there a way of bringing any hidden content out into the open?
As I stated earlier, looking at file sizes doesn't really tell you much, and can be quite misleading. So I wouldn't bother showing me your table of file sizes. When you say "seems to contain only a few folders", are you determining this via the file size, or did you actually look into the catalog with your own eyes and see what folders are in there? When you look at a catalog to see what it contains, you can go to "All Photographs", sort them by date, and then see the earliest and latest dates of the photos. You can use the filter bar to get more detail about what dates are (or are not) included in the catalog.
It also happens to people that sometimes the wrong catalog is upgraded, which can cause certain expected folders to not be in the upgraded catalog.
By @dj_paige
To dj_paige:
I am referring to the two files that you were not able to open as attachments. You find them at the top of this post.
Regarding file size - I have noted your advise not to use file size to judge catalog contents. I included it in the table only as a rough indication.
I have looked into the catalog "with my own eyes", and extracted two pieces of information from each catalog and presented that in the table of the file "LR Classic_Study of Catalog Contents.pdf:
1.) Total No. of pictures.
2.) The dates for the earliest and the latest folder of pictures.
Thanks for the tip about sorting "All photographs" on date, this will definitely be a useful tool.
CONCLUDING SUMMARY
Based on the collected advice from dj_paige, JohanElzenga and drtonyb, I have gone through the following procedure, ending up with one master catalog for future use:
- Inspected – with my own eyes - the contents of my original «fauna» of catalogs. This involved the following work:
1.) Opening (and upgrading as required) each catalog in turn.
2.) Collecting screen dumps in a Word document per catalog, to enable a better overview for checking of contents. - Created a new, empty catalog named "Lightroom Catalog Master", located on the external harddisk where my original picture files are organised in folders; E:\Bilder\Lightroom\Lightroom Catalog Master.
As mentioned in one of my posts above, the picture folders are named such that they appear in chronological order (e.g. E:\Bilder\2007-09-02_Dordogne). - After inspection of catalog contents, I chose to import (File>Import Pictures and Videos) only two of the original catalogs, "Lightroom Catalog-v13-3-2.lrcat" and "Lightroom Catalog-2-v13.lrcat". They cover the span of picture folders adequately, except for a small number of the most recent imports to Lightroom, which I cannot find in any of the catalogs.
What sent me off on this "crusade" initially, was the missing folders in the then current folder, "Lightroom Catalog-v13-3-2.lrcat":
The folders appeared «out of the blue» at some stage of this process. I suspect that they were hidden under the drive D: shown in the picture above. I believe that I was misled to think that there was nothing inside that drive, and never opened it
Anyway, this «crusade» has been very useful. I am now better equipped to handle catalogs in LRC, they felt previously like a dark cloud hanging over my head. So, I am grateful to the above mentioned community experts for guiding me through this!
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