Lost photos different cameras same file number ?

[vanessac49961537]

Hi there

On a recent holiday I used two cameras and imported the pics daily (I thought) into Lightroom Classic on an external drive.

But when I look at the folders I found both cameras with their different lenses' pics appeared in the same folder many times and I can't find many photos I remember taking. I have concluded that the two cameras must somehow have the same folder numbers then. Can anyone help me please to somehow retrieve these photos which are very special to me as it was a once off trip unlikely to be repeated.

Obviously I am a bit clueless being an amateur photographer.

Many thanks in advance!!

[Guest]

Moving to the Lightroom Classic forum from Get Started

[Conrad C]

There's actually nothing wrong with importing pictures and videos from multiple cameras into the same folder. I have Lightroom Classic organize my imports by date, and in each date folder (such as 2019-11-20), there are photos and videos from multiple cameras, because I want all content for an event to be stored together, not by device.

You can start working out what happened to your images by viewing them by camera:

1. In the Library module, in the left panel under Folders, select the folder that contains all images from the trip. Set the view to Grid.
2. In the Library module, use the Metadata filter and set the first column to Camera. Now you can see a count of images by camera. You can also select a camera model to see only the photos taken with that camera model.
3. If both cameras were the same model, you can set the second column to Camera Serial Number so that you can view only the photos taken by each unique camera.

This will let you see which pictures were taken by which camera, and how many pictures were taken by each camera. Look through them and see if any events you took photos of are missing, or if you think the number of pictures by each camera is about what you expected.

My guess is that Lightroom Classic imported everything, and if there were duplicate file names on import, it probably added a number to the end of a duplicate file name instead of erasing/replacing a previously imported image.

[Vanessa777]

Thank you very much for the help Conrad!