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A
Anonymous
March 13, 2018
Answered

Original file cannot be found, yet original file has not moved.

  • March 13, 2018
  • 1 reply
  • 1136 views

Hi, I hope someone can help me with this strange problem.

I noticed today that a whole group of photos existed in Lightroom only as smart previews.  I went into grid mode and clicked on the smart preview icon to connect to the original file but the file could not be found. In fact none of them could be.  Lightroom then offers the chance to search for it yourself, which I did, and only found one of about 500 photos in the folder.  Needless to say I panicked, and panicked again when I could not find the backups either.  However, when I searched for the photos in Windows, there they all were and each opened up perfectly in the image browser.

Does anyone have any clue to what's going on? This isn't the first problem I've had with this set of photos.

Kind regards,

EL

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer

    Hi thanks for your reply.  No there were none, the files were still where I imported them to.   Lightroom still thought they were associated files so it didn't think there was anything to search for. However when I tried to do it manually it  there was only one visible file in the Lightroom 'locate missing photo' browser, (rather than in Lightroom itself), so I couldn't see the photos to re-associate them, while in the windows search browser I could.

    I've solved the problem by re-associating the remaining photo, at which point another one became visible, then I re-associated that one etc. etc.  I can't work out what happened for the life of me, but I hope this helps anyone else with a similar problem.

    Regards,

    EL

    1 reply

    dj_paige
    dj_paige
    Legend
    March 13, 2018

    Are there question mark icons or exclamation point icons on your photos when viewed in the Library Module grid? (See Figure 2 in this document for an example: Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders )

    A
    Anonymous
    Correct answer
    March 13, 2018

    Hi thanks for your reply.  No there were none, the files were still where I imported them to.   Lightroom still thought they were associated files so it didn't think there was anything to search for. However when I tried to do it manually it  there was only one visible file in the Lightroom 'locate missing photo' browser, (rather than in Lightroom itself), so I couldn't see the photos to re-associate them, while in the windows search browser I could.

    I've solved the problem by re-associating the remaining photo, at which point another one became visible, then I re-associated that one etc. etc.  I can't work out what happened for the life of me, but I hope this helps anyone else with a similar problem.

    Regards,

    EL

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