What a mess I've made

Report · Nov 25, 2025

Somehow I've created a huge mess and I'm not sure how to get out of it.

Bear with me, this takes some explaining.

My Lightroom Classic catalog has folders going back to 2012.

Up to the end of 2019 these folders were all on a single hard-drive, this filled up and at the beginning of 2020 I started using a second and new external SSD hardrive for the years 2020-2025.

So, I was working away after happily after unplugging that first drive with the 2012-2019 folders.

This left me with just the thumbnails as a reference for the years 2012-2019 whenever I was searching my catalog.

Not ideal, but I was able to see the Lightroom created previews and I was happy enough to unplug my newer drive, reattach the old drive and navigate to the required images whenever I needed to.

I had the brilliant idea though that I should get a new and faster SSD drive to go with the newer drive that holds the 2020-25 files, what I'd do, I decided, was to copy the existing files from the 2012-19 drive onto this new drive, then attach a 2 port USB hub to my laptop and plug the new drive in next to the existing drive.

Giving both drives different letters.

I figured all I had to do was to navigate to one of the old files that were now on the new drive, click the "find missing image" option, select the find nearby images option and everything would be back to normal.

What's happened is that during the copying process, rather that just bring over the images folder by folder from the old drive to the new drive, for some reason it decided to copy over a folder for the year, a folder for the month and a folder for each individual day.

This meant I would have to go through each and every folder to "find missing image".

Thousands of individual folders.

I thought that by selecting the option to select a folder that would enable me to navigate to at least just the month or year to find the missing images.

It didn't.

It's created an awful mess, thousands of missing images, keywords missing and no thumbnail previews for the years 2012-19

Luckily I have a backup catalog from a few days ago which I can try again with.

It also has lost all the previews on it, but I guess they will redo when I figure out what's going on.

The question is, how should I get Lightroom Classic to find this new drive and navigate successfully to the images without me having to individually select each folder for each day of each month of each year.

I've started the long process but have only managed to attach about 200 or so images of around 60,000.

There must be a way for Lightroom to recognize the parent folder and the subfolders when reattaching.

Thanks

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Hey, @Mr_rossduncan. Welcome to the Lightroom Community. I'll help you figure this out.

If the folders are still in the same hierarchy as before on the new drive, you can right-click on the Folder list in Lightroom's Library module & select "Show Parent folder" until you reach the top-most folder, and then try updating the location for the parent folder.

Let me know how it goes. Thanks!

Sameer K
(Type '@' and type my name to mention me when you reply)

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I decided, was to copy the existing files from the 2012-19 drive onto this new drive

Did you do this copy in Windows? Or did you do this copy inside of Lightroom Classic.?

What's happened is that during the copying process, rather that just bring over the images folder by folder from the old drive to the new drive, for some reason it decided to copy over a folder for the year, a folder for the month and a folder for each individual day.

This sounds like you imported the photos into LrC rather than copy them. Is that what you did?

Did you make backups of all your photos and your catalog before you did this? Can you return to the status of all files before you did this, and start over?