Summary/tl;dr:
I expected the process of Locating Missing Photo to Find nearby missing photos, but it didn't, even though there were other missing photos in the same folder as the one I was locating. I think it's because some of the missing photos were Already In Catalog in a different folder, but there was no indication that was happening. It just found the one photo and acted as if it had done what I'd asked, giving no indication anything was awry.
Lightroom Classic v12.4 Camera Raw 15.4
Windows 11 Pro Version 22H2 Build 22621.1992
The Story:
I photographed a wrestling tournament where I had an assistant working on editing while I was photographing three mats of ongoing competition. As champions were crowned, I was then doing portraits of them before returning to the competition to get more coverage. At various points, I also did some editing on my machine. Thus, I had two catalogs with images, mine and my assistant's. Not a terribly big deal.
After everything was over, I went to the task of merging everything together. I did a ton of organizing and renaming to get everything lined up appropriately. Somewhere along the way, I decided to break out the portraits into their own folder. Somewhere else along the way, I also imported my assistant's catalog into mine. I'm not sure the order of everything.
Most of the images assimilated just fine, however there were about 30 files that we had both worked on independently (out of 20k+ total images), and somehow Lightroom had two copies of those in the catalog. (I probably allowed this on import at some point, or when renaming; I'm not sure.)
So what ended up happening was that some photos showed up as missing because Lightroom expected them in one folder, but I had moved them to another. I expected to locate one missing photo, click "Find nearby missing photos" and it would match up all the rest of them, maybe 75 images. But that's not what happened. No matter how I went about it, it would only find one image at a time, even though I knew all the missing files were together in the same folder I was pointing to.
Eventually, I got to one that returned the notification, 'Already In Catalog: The file "filename" is associated with another photo in the catalog. Each file can only be associated with one photo.' And it clicked: it wasn't finding the other photos because once it saw that any of them were already in the catalog, it was aborting the process of finding nearby missing photos, instead of just skipping those already existing and finding the rest that weren't compromised in that way.
So I went through all the missing photos, identified the ones that were already in catalog, removed them from Lightroom, and then ran the Find nearby missing photos and it immediately found the rest of them as expected.
I don't know if this is the intended functionality, but it seems to me that it should find all of them that it can, or at least give an indication that it aborted because some were already in the catalog. Or both. Instead, there was no justification given for why the process failed. I can't seem to find any forum posts or program documentation that suggests this is how it should behave, so I wonder if it's a bug.
I do this kind of catalog fixing all the time. I've got just about 1.2 million photos in my current catalog going back to 2007. Sometimes things get jumbled up and I have to fix them. I imagine I've come across this before, but I just wrote it off and found them all one-by-one because the numbers weren't terribly high. This was on the cusp of "too annoying to deal with individually" so I've spent the time writing it up. It might be working as intended and I'm just an edge case, but I've seen other posts about people being frustrated by the process, and I do wonder if they were experiencing the same issue I had, and so maybe it's not working as well as it could.
AdChoices