What to do if no original exists

[BobF18]

I understand about moving originals to my backup drive and both reconnecting them manually and moving them within the application so I don't have to reconnect after.

I can't seem to find anyone with this particular one:  I have moved a couple of photos from either my phone or desktop and imported like I do regularly.  When doing my usual filing today, I see that handful of them from over the last 30 days do not have originals.  The photo is there and there is a smart preview, but no original despite a pretty exhaustive search.

Is there a way to tell Lightroom that this file IS the original and go from there?

Thanks!

[dj_paige]

"The photo is there and there is a smart preview, but no original despite a pretty exhaustive search."

How do you know the photo is there? What do you see? Are you talking about you see it in Lightroom or you see it in your operating system?

When you do a "pretty exhaustive search", does that mean you had your operating system search all hard disk(s) and networked drives (if any) for files by that particular name?

Did you look in the trash/recycle bin?

Has the photo been renamed?

"Is there a way to tell Lightroom that this file IS the original and go from there?"

I am not aware of any way of telling Lightrtoom that a Smart Preview is in fact the original from now on. You might be able to search the smart preview cache folder and find the actual smart previews for these photos and copy them and then use them from now on, a very manual approach.

[JP Hess]

The idea of having smart previews is to have them available when the master images are NOT available because they are possibly on an external hard drive that is interconnected at the time. But the smart previews are not intended to be a permanent replacement for the master images. They are to be used for interim editing, but the master images must always be available at some point. Otherwise all your hard work on the Smart previews is really for nothing.

[GoldingD]

see: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

[GoldingD · Accepted solution]

1. When you Import your photos using Lightroom Classic, where do you store them? What is the destination?

[BobF18]

Got it!  When I import, normally I "move" them in.  Somehow I hit 'add' instead.  The good news is that I caught it fast and only have 6 photos that got dumped in the process, but I'll be sure to look at that import dialog before hitting import from now on.

Thanks everyone!!!

[GoldingD]

2. When you backup your photos, where do you store them? Where do you place the backups?

[GoldingD]

3. How do you backup your photos?

Do you simply Copy them to a folder on a hard drive?

Do you use a backup program?

You Copy the photos, correct? not move them, correct?