Hi,
Please forgive me, as I know this is a question that gets asked all the time. I've tried to fix the problem via extensive searching on this forum and other help websites, but haven't been able to find a solution that works for me.
I recently made the switch from using a Mac and its Photos app to a Windows with Lightroom Classic, and am still relatively new to Lightroom. Before I understood how Lightroom works, I renamed one of my folders in the file explorer while setting up my file hierarchy, and it caused problems with missing folders and photos. That was a few months ago, and I now know to do everything through lightroom. However, it's been long enough since that happened that I cannot remember exactly what I've done in between then and now. I believe in past months I've tried finding missing folders and synchronizing various folders when I encountered missing photos without fully understanding the extent of the problem. My current situation is this: My main parent folder is All_photos, and it has two subfolders called Mac_photos and Windows_photos, with Mac_photos being the one that contains all the subfolders and photos that I took before I made the switch. As I mentioned, at some point it was renamed to Mac_photos_importedOct18 in windows file explorer. Now, it appears that some of the subfolders appear in the new renamed folders, but other subfolders are still missing in the old folder that LR can longer find. In addition, even in the subfolders that do appear in the new folder, not all of the pictures appear linked there. Some photos are still only linked to the older folder. As you can see in the photos below, there are thousands of photos in the subfolders of the older folder that don't appear linked to the subfolders of the renamed folder. I have tried right-clicking on the older missing folder (Mac_photos) and trying to "Find Missing Folder" by clicking on the renamed folder, but LR gives me an error message that I'm not sure how to interpret (see photos below).
As a workaround, I tried targeting the subfolders. When I tried to "Find missing folder" for one of the missing subfolders in Mac_photos such as the 2000 folder and update it to the 2000 folder in the renamed folder, it asked if I wanted to merge the two. I clicked okay, and got the following message:
Now it appears that it worked for the most part for almost all of the subfolders. For example, My 2000 subfolder in the renamed folder appears to have many more photos in it, and the missing subfolder only contains the "duplicate" photos that were already in the new subfolder. I went ahead and did this for all my subfolders. However, for some reason it's not working for last subfolder (Mac_photos > Photo_albums > Mammals). When I tried to link this one to the correct subfolder in the renamed parent folder, it gave me the same error as before. It also gives me this error if I try to find the subfolders within the Mammals folder.
Can someone tell me what this error means and how to fix it?
I'd also like to know what's the best practice for dealing with the remaining missing photos/folders you can see in the folder panel on the left in my last screenshot - they are the "duplicates" that LR didn't merge. Can I get rid of these somehow?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
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