Files I have deleted from my PC are still showing up in LR

Question

Hello,

I have been going through my back-end catalogue (if you will) deleting duplicates, crappy photos etc in order to create disk space but for some reason this is wreaking havoc with my LR. I will give you an example -

So I had 300+ photos on my camera, I imported these to a folder on my laptop ('Canada') and then imported to LR. I have 2 cards, one for RAW and one for JPEG (I only import RAW) and decided to save some space by deleting duplicates, squint photos, out of focus etc down to 174 photos in total in the Canada Folder. I also have a Collection on LR called Canada and it also contained 300+ photos. So I expected that these would now disappear from the collection on LR and I would need to then remove the 'residual' however these photos were all still there. I followed the 'Show in Explorer' option and then discovered another, random Folder in my pictures called 2017 with random back ups of various photos, not limited to Canada. I deleted these photos and expected that this would fix it however they are still there. I then decided to remove all photos linked to Canada from LR and then re-import them. After deleting them from LR, they were completely gone - great! However, since re-importing all 174 them, only 124 exist in the folder and for some reason, pictures that I know I deleted from my PC are now back in LR. The thing is, when I click the photo, it tells me they cannot be located. Does anyone know where I might have gone wrong in this regard that's resulted in my photos going skee-wiff?

I also backed up my catalogue last night after upgrading to Lightroom Classic CC and now it's telling me "This appears to be a duplicate or automatically created backup of your catalog. As it may not be current, sync has been disabled for this catalog. Please open your production catalog to resume sync. To make this your sync catalog, go to: Edit > Preferences > Lightroom mobile and click the "Delete All Data" to start fresh"

I've done this and no change.

Can anyone help?

Thanks

F. McLion · Accepted Answer

Some rules regarding file deletions:- LR will not automatically reflect file deletions in Explorer - you need to sync the folder (right click on folder - sync) to have LR reflect changes not made in LR.- If you delete a file in LR, you will always be asked whether it should only be removed from the catalog or also be deleted from the disk.- Reimporting is never a good idea since you then loose all of the work done to these images.Basic rule: Carry out all file and folder manipulation from within LR.

Theresa J · Answer

The simple and often misunderstood fact about Lightroom is that images do not live inside of Lightroom. Importing does not put images into Lightroom, it simply points to the location on the drive. Lightroom remembers the information about images even after the image is gone.

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