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I moved a photo sent to me and captured on an iPhone. It was on my desktop and I dragged it into LR. I made a few edits in Develop and then chose to make a new catalog and gave it a name. The image was nowhere to be found which isn't the problem. I no longer saw any images in my Library. I rebooted which did nothing. How do I get all my images back? LR is most recent version from the subscription and I use Windows 10.
Help!
Photodoc16
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Just so I understand the issue:
You were working in old Catalog_A.
You created new, empty Catalog_B.
Are the old images still in Catalog_A, as they should be?
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If you move a photo outside of the Lightroom Catalog (via your operating system or some other application), Lightroom Classic loses track of it. This is expected behavior. Lightroom Classic is NOT a file browser like Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. Lightroom Classic uses a database to keep track of photos and moving the photos outside of Lightroom Classic means the database does not know where the photo is located, and can't use the photo. Best to make sure you understand this point about how Lightroom Classic operates ... we see people in this forum who have not understood this point, and they get unnecessarily frustrated (and even angry) about this. Once you understand this point, Lightroom CLassic works beautifully and gives you a very smooth, easy and powerful organizing tool.
Furthermore, in my opinion, there is rarely a need to move photos from one catalog to a new catalog. This is a very cumbersome way of organizing compared to using tools like keywords and metadata. (NOTE: there are valid reasons for having more than one catalog, but these do not apply to a lot of people, and especially for beginners, one catalog is the way to go)
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dj__paige,
The fact is that I moved a photo into LR from an outside source. After that I really did not know how to save it. I should have moved it back to the desktop via the LR dropdown.
I am sure there will be a next time. Do you know of any way to keep it in LR?
Thank you for your help and I will never pick a New Catalog again.
Richard
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Don't move it outside of Lightroom Classic, and Lightroom Classic will be fine, and you will have no problems. You can move it inside of Lightroom Classic.
Bbetter yet don't put photos on your computer's desktop (a particularly poor choice when working with Lightroom Classic), store them in some folder somewhere and leave them there, don't move them inside or outside of Lightroom Classic, and use keywords and other metadata to help you organize and search, and you will never have this problem again.
And as I said above, I now saw with emphasis: Please spend some time viewing videos or reading tutorials about how the Lightroom CLassic catalog works.
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It was on my desktop and I dragged it into LR.
Hmmm, What exact Lightroom product?
Lightroom Classis
Lightroom (desktop, a.k.a cloudy)
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GOLDingD,
LR Classic is Version 10 on a desktop.
Richard
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What you are describing is exactly how Lightroom is supposed to work. Lightroom uses catalogs which work exactly like a catalog in an old-fashioned library. A catalog is just a collection of records of where images reside on your hard disk and a bunch of metadata including an editing recipe. Say you imported an image in catalog A, catalog A now has arecord of this image and knows where it resides on your hard disk. If you now open a new catalog - say catalog B, the new catalog has no entries for any images you imported and are referenced in catalog A. Catalog B has never been told about the new image in catalog A.