Photos Missing from LR Catalog; Not in Designated Folders in Apple Finder

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 12, 2022
2 replies
340 views

Six consecutive months' of my photos, organized in some 25 date-identified folders and stored on my Macbook computer can no longer be found. The images, some sharp and some blurred, appear in the Library function in the current version of Lightroom, but cannot be modified or (presumably) exported. The relevant folders in Apple Finder have no contents.

In contrast, photos taken since late 2019 and stored on my Mac computer, are available, as are photos taken prior to that period and stored on an external hard drive.

Attached is a screenshot of the photos in Library mode.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

macOS

This topic has been closed for replies.

E

ExploreAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks John...

Following your directions, the images pop up but only as locked single images. Any way to get them back into Lightroom?

Roger

JohanElzenga

Community Expert

The search that John suggested locates the image(s). You do not have to 'get them into Lightroom', because they are already imported. You just have to tell Lightroom where to find the images, now that you know where they are. You can probably do that by 'relinking' to top folder. Here's how: https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/

-- Johan W. Elzenga

johnrellis

Legend

Well, I did download the recommended plug-in and it works almost effortlessly. Hats off to the author! The only problem is that most of my preview images are blurred in standard size and are sent to the designated folder only as tiny thumbnails. Strangely, a minority of images are crisp at standard size and are saved that way.

I assume that I'm stuck with the poor resolution on the thumbnails. But why would some images be standard size and others not?

LR keeps a "pyramid" of different-sized previews, generating the different sizes as needed based on your current preferences. It may be that your catalog's preview cache just doesn't have the larger sizes for many of your photos.

You might also try this Adobe script:

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/kb/extract-previews-for-lost-images-lightroom.html

It doesn't annotate the extracted images with catalog metadata like the plugin does, but it's possible that it might do a better job of finding larger previews. (The preview database is undocumented, and the plugin author had to reverse engineer its format.)

johnrellis

Legend

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Perhaps the missing photos got accidentally moved somehow. Use Finder to search for six or so of the missing file names:

Be sure to select This Mac, and make sure any external drives you've used for your LR photos are connected.

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