LR Catalog is a mess.

[GigiKC]

My Lightroom Classic 12.4 is a mess! My photos reside on OneDrive. My LR Catalog is on my C://hard drive. I backup my LR catalog and photos to an external hard drive.

In Lightoorm, All Photos shows over 17,000 photos. I should have about 1500-2000 at the most.  I have always had trouble with Lightroom when I go to edit in Photoshop, giving me the error messages, File is corrupted or can not be found. Now my previews have disappeared.

My file structure on Overdrive is by topic. For example, OD: Photos/Travel/[individual trips]/[photos]. My LR collections are identical to the File structure.

I'm ready to delete everthing and start over from scratch.

Any suggestions or solutions are appreciated.

Debbie

[dj_paige]

Storing files on OneDrive could be the cause of your problems. Depending on what options you are setting for OneDrive, the files may not be stored on your local computer and that's why the file can't be found; and this is also a potential cause of files becoming corrupted.

Dropbox may be (or may not be) why LrC thinks you have over 17000 images when you don't. Do yourself a favor, look at these 17000 images with your own eyes, and see if you can figure out what they are and why there are so many of them.

Starting over is not the approach I would recommend. If you start over, but don't change anything except a new catalog, you will wind up with the same mess. The solution I recommend is to figure out what happened and avoid this in the future.

My LR collections are identical to the File structure.

Different topic, but what is the point of creating a collection structure that is identical to file structure?

[GigiKC]

Collections are same as file structure for ease of keeping up with files. I see your point...if I'm managing my files through LR there's no need for them to be the same.