Smart Preview edits went away after reconnecting hard drive

[byevening]

HELP!!! I built smart previews and started working without my hard drive.

When I was ready to export, I reconnected my hard drive but an exclamation point showed up next to the pictures. After I clicked it, all the edits on my photos DISAPPEARED!

How do I get my edits back??? I'm about to cry just thinking I'm gonna have to re-edit all the photos again 😞

[dj_paige]

Here's a possible explanation

When you reconnected the drive, Windows assigned a different letter to the drive. Please try changing the letter on the drive to whatever it was previously. This should reconnect all of your photos.

If that's not it, then we need to see a screen capture of your Library Module Grid view (the entire screen). Use the "Insert Photos" icon to include your screen capture in your reply. Do NOT attach files.

[byevening]

My hard drive is assigned to a certain letter so that shouldn’t be the
issue 😕

[dj_paige]

Windows can change the drive letter when you unplug a drive and then re-plug it in later. You absolutely must be sure that didn't happen.

Repeating from my earlier message: If that's not it, then we need to see a screen capture of your Library Module Grid view (the entire screen). Use the "Insert Photos" icon to include your screen capture in your reply. Do NOT attach files.

[JohanElzenga]

If you have smart previews, then that exclamation mark wasn't the 'missing image' sign. It must have been another exclamation mark icon, that has a black background. That one indicates a reading error, which could mean the connection to the drive was flaky. But clicking the exclamation mark should never let you lose edits, regardless of which one it was. So tell us exactly what the exclamation mark looked like, and what dialog you got when you clicked it.

[byevening]

It was my first time encountering something like that so I don’t remember
what kind of exclamation point it was, other than that it was a black
exclamation point on the top right corner of each image.

After I clicked it, it said something along the lines of “can’t locate the
original source of the image, so you want to link it to the source?” I
clicked “yes” and that made all the edits, including my star ratings,
disappear. I pressed the undo button but nothing came back.

[JohanElzenga]

That shouldn't be possible, so that is strange. The whole idea of having smart previews is that images can be missing without a problem, so you will not/should not get that 'missing image' exclamation mark icon if you have a smart previews for that image. You can force the same dialog to show if you click on the smart preview icon, however.

If you click 'Yes' in that dialog, then you will get another dialog that you must use to navigate to the current location of the image and select it. That 'reconnects' the image in the catalog to the real location on disk. So what did you do next?