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tommymfarina
Participating Frequently
January 1, 2019
Question

Lightroom Folders Missing, then synced under new external drive - why?

  • January 1, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 451 views

Hello,

my problem is actually two-fold:

1)

I have in different hierarchical structures all in all about 2000 folders in my catalague. They have been all the time on my external NAS drive (which sometimes is not connected, even though LR is still running). This has worked fine until one of the latest updates (don't know if this is rather because of LR updates or Mac OS updates). NOW: All the sudden many folders are marked with an "?", i.e. missing - but can be easily found on my NAS. This means, I can now manually go through all the missing folders and manually find them again? Is this the only way to do it?

2) When I go and look for the missing folder and re-connect it - it then appears under a new harddrive in my folder panel. So, all the sudden I have the same external NAS twice there.... Why? How can I avoid it?

It seems to be a total mess to me - and I don't know how to get out of it....

Thanks

Tommy

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1 reply

dj_paige
dj_paige
Legend
January 1, 2019

1) You can connect the entire Hierarchy of folders in one operation. See Figure 4 here: Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

2) This happens sometimes on Mac computers, however since I don't use Macs, I'm not sure why. The solution is here: Folders panel displays same hard drive twice

T
tommymfarinaAuthor
Participating Frequently
January 3, 2019

Thank you very much for your help - indeed, the connection of the complete hierarchy of folders worked fine (btw, by doing that, the "second" harddrive did also disappear. So, thanks.

But still, I have no idea, why this all happened and how to avoid (not only to correct) this. Anyone?

    K
    koenraad.bats@ds-n.com
    Known Participant
    November 9, 2021

    tommymfarina  wrote

    Thank you very much for your help - indeed, the connection of the complete hierarchy of folders worked fine (btw, by doing that, the "second" harddrive did also disappear. So, thanks.

    But still, I have no idea, why this all happened and how to avoid (not only to correct) this. Anyone?

    Lightroom uses the disk name to identify a drive. While MacOS X is case-insensitive, Lightroom is not. It’s possible that the NAS mounted with a capital letter (or lower case letter) in the disk name that was the opposite previously. Maybe the update did that. MacOS X would not show that, but Lightroom would see it and so it would think that this was a different disk. By ‘reconnecting’ all the folders to this ‘new disk’ you solved this, and now the ‘old’ disk no longer shows in Lightroom either.


    This is an issue on Windows 10 too. Actually I've never seen this on my Mac (I recently switched to Windows).

     

    This issue happened to me when trying to reconnect to a folder with a special character in its name (an "é"). Dj_paiges solution worked for me.

     

    It's not the first time I have to deal with missing folders ever since I switched to Windows, and it all was related to this special character (I have lots of pictures taken in the Ardèche - a French region). Most likely it has something to do with the coding of this character on different operating systems (Mac,Win, Linux).

     

    However that doesn't explain why my NAS was loaded twice this time.

    FYI the name of my NAS hasn't changed since I first installed it years ago and there are no special characters in it.

     

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