Opening a catalog from an external SSD on a new computer

[Pedro Ossowicki]

I've always edited on Lightroom Classic off an external SSD, my whole catalog was there. Recently, my laptop unfortunately suffered a bit of an accident and completely stopped working. "Thank god" I thought, since I've always edited off the external drive, meaning my catalogue was there and safe. Now I got a new computer and kinda expected to stick in the external drive and easily find the catalogue and have it as if nothing ever happened, but I'm not managing to do this. When I click on "Open Catalogue" and go on Finder to the location where all my stuff was, the "Choose" button remains grey as if the file that I'm choosing isn't the correct one for this action. Can someone help? I'm starting to think that the 'catalogue' I thought I had is actually just all the raw files without any edit. I'm nervousss.

(the image attatched is how the 'catalogue' looks on Finder)

[dj_paige]

There's no catalog in there. What happens if you open one of the folder shown?

[Pedro Ossowicki]

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I now realise that that's not the catalogue, it's only where the images are stored. Thankfully, I had made a backup for the catalogue somewhere else and had forgotten about it. I just rescued it and everything is fine! I guess I posted before actually looking at the full picture just caused I panicked a bit hahhaaha. 

[JohanElzenga]

I believe you confuse the storage location of original images and the Lightroom catalog. This looks like the folders that contain your original images. The Lightroom catalog is something else and could well have been on your internal drive, in your Pictures folder. That is the default location where Lightroom stores it if you do not overrule that.

[Pedro Ossowicki]

Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I now realise that that's not the catalogue, it's only where the images are stored. Thankfully, I had made a backup for the catalogue somewhere else and had forgotten about it. I just rescued it and everything is fine! I guess I posted before actually looking at the full picture just caused I panicked a bit hahhaaha. 

Thanks for such a fast response tho 🙂