Reimport Photos into LR Classic?

[tobyisaac]

Hi All,

I couldn't find this specific issue, though I may have just missed it in prior threads. I accidentally imported photos from my memory card straight to my computer rather than my portable hard drive. I have very little storage left on my computer, so I then (stupidly) deleted the photos from my computer & emptied the trash (Mac High Sierra OS). When I try to import those photos from my memory card again to my portable hard drive, Lightroom shows me the photos from my memory card (they are still there; the memory card has not been formatted) but they are greyed out and I can't reimport them. When I click on an individual photo, LR says "This photo is a suspected duplicate." I looked in my file folders on my Mac and the photos have indeed been deleted.

So I have photos on my memory card, LR sees that I imported them before, I subsequently deleted them & emptied the trash, and now LR won't let me reimport. Is there a fix for this?

Thanks so much for the help.

[kglad]

[moved from Adobe Creative Cloud to Lightroom Classic — The desktop-focused app]

[ManiacJoe · Accepted solution]

Importing again is 99% of the time a wrong answer to any problem.

The correct answer to what you wanted to do was to just move the image files to your portable hard drive then tell LR where you moved them to.

Since you have deleted the files from disk, to get the import to happen again, you need to delete the files from Lightroom, which will delete all edits you have made on those images.

You can also turn off the check for duplicates, but that will give you the images listed twice in the catalog until you remove or some how merge the previous import.

[dj_paige]

Don't import from the memory card. RE-IMPORTING is wrong, makes the problem worse, and it is evil too.

Simply use your operating system to COPY the photos from camera card to whatever location on an external drive you want them to be stored in. Then, in Lightroom, re-connect to the new location of the photos following these instructions. Then you will lose NONE of your edits.

Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders

[tobyisaac]

Thank you both! Much appreciated advice and lesson learned. No more reimporting for me.

I deleted the photos from LR and imported them again, which did the trick. Thankfully I hadn't made any edits so it wasn't a big loss of time.

Thanks again!