missing photos in my catalog

[Gina M]

HELP PLEASE!!  Just upgraded from lightroom 6 to 9.4 on my macbook pro and missing all the photos in my catalog from about feb 2019 - now (about 1500-2000 photos).  Had to upgrade the catalog when I opened new version of lightroom.  I heard this is an issue with upgrading catalogs but now how to I fix it?  I see my original catalog is still on my hard drive.  

[JohanElzenga]

Sounds like Lightroom upgraded the wrong catalog, namely an older one. Perhaps it upgraded a backup copy? Look in your Pictures folder for a Lightroom folder and then look for files with a .lrcat extension. Those are catalog files. You can also use the search function in the Finder to look for them.

[gary_sc]

Hi Gina,

One piece of good news is that your photos are NOT lost. It's just that for some reason they did not apparently update with the catalog. 

Couple of questions: (What format are these images (raw, jpg)?

Do you have thumbnails for these images with an exclamation point (!) on the thumbnail and when you click on that it says the orginal images are missing?

Here's the big one: how do you keep ALL your photos? That is, are they randomly distributed across your computer's hard drive (and are some of them placed on external drives) or are they always placed within one folder. (FWIW, I always recommend the latter approach as it becomes easier to deal with situations like these. The former can also be dealt with, it's just a tad more work otherwise.

One last question just so I know what we're dealing with here: What is your OS and what release?

Thanks for answering these questions, it'll be easier to know what I'm dealing with to help you. 

[bamoeller1]

I have one folder called "Lightroom."  I have man subfolders in that folder. My operating system is Monterey--12.5.

[ManiacJoe · Accepted solution]

In LrC, open the old catalog again so that it does the data migration again, and see if it works correctly this time.

[Gina M]

this worked - thanks!