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I was just prompted to upgrade to LrC so I did. I am now missing over 5000 photos. Most of them look like photos I have previously deleted, but some are favourites. I have tried to locate the photos and link them but I can't find them anywhere. I believe I was using LR not LrC when I upgraded and didn't notice. Could this be the problem? Is there a fix?
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Hi Caroline,
I have a hunch that you opened a default Catalog that has no images in it. Please look around your computer for a file with a suffix "xxxxx.lrcat" where "xxxxx" is the name of the catalog. Once you find that, double-click it and you'll find all your images.
Let me know what you find
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I should also mention it still have thousands of photos that are there with no issues. Out if 14,000, 5000 are missing, they have either the smart preview white box at to right or exclamation mark at top left.
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Please post your System Information as Lightroom Classic (LrC) reports it. In LrC click on Help, then System Info, then Copy. Paste that information into a reply. Please present all information from first line down to and including Plug-in Info. Info after Plug-in info can be cut as that is just so much dead space to us non-Techs.
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Do you perhaps have an external hard drive that is not plugged in or turned on?
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External hard drive is plugged in. I ended up finding many of the missing photos in a file on my external hard drive called mobile downloads. All of them were imported from my SD card so I'm not sure how they got there or why the folder is called that. I did not create that folder. I've backed everything up now, so crisis averted. Photos that I couldn't find but had smart previews of I saved as jpegs in another folder as a backup.
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Do you still have that old computer? Are the missing images on it? Perhaps they did not get copied to the new computer?
Remember, photos are not stored in the catalog.
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No I don't have the old computer, but I saved all folders to my external hard drive before I disposed of it.
I just didn't know I had to tell Lightroom where to look.
I'll be more careful in the future when switching things over.
Thanks so much for your replies and help.
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One of the good things and "less than good" things about LRC is that it doesn't care where the images are located. It just want to know where to look and is then happy.
What I've done to keep my sanity is to keep ALL of LRC's images in one folder (and as many subsequent sub-folders as I see fit). Then if I ever need to relocate images, I just have to go to that one folder.