100's of photos are missing from albums in LR Cloud

[bfilipiak]

I recently opened LR Mobile on my iPhone to show some photos to a friend.  When I navigated to one of my albums, all but one photo were missing.  I navigated to another, and hundreds of photos are missing.  I assumed this was poor connectivity on the mobile device, but then when I opened LR Cloud on my desktop today, the same issue persists.  There is absolutely no way I deleted these photos.  Version 9.0 is presently running.

How can I get these photos back?

[Aleke]

Hi @bfilipiak, welcome to the community!
Photos usually don’t go missing in Lightroom cloud, so let’s check a few things. First, make sure you’re signed in with the correct Adobe ID. If syncing is having trouble, try visiting Lightroom Web at https://adobe.ly/4q5aA8o to see if your photos appear there.
If you accidentally deleted them, they might be in the Deleted folder. Also, if there are any syncing problems, you’ll see a Sync Issues folder.
Thanks,
Alek

[bfilipiak]

Thanks @Aleke.  The photos that are missing are portions of a series of photos.  Several photos remain in the series, but literally hundreds are missing.  They are not showing up in the deleted folder, and I do not see a sync issues folder either, though I'm not 100% sure where I'd see that.  A handful are photos I had flagged to have printed and had added to a separate album for "Prints."  There were maybe ten in that folder, and now just one, as an example.  Another folder went from several hundred photos down to 20, and they aren't best ones.  I have double checked that no filters are turned on.  I took the photos with bothan iPhone, and a Nikon D850 in Raw.  The Nikon photos appear to be largely what's missing, though there are some Nikon Raw photos still there.

[bfilipiak]

Additionally, the "All Photos" number is about 1,100 greater than the sum of photos in the various albums.

[Jim Wilde · Accepted solution]

Additionally, the "All Photos" number is about 1,100 greater than the sum of photos in the various albums.

By @bfilipiak

What that means is that there are around 1100 images that are in the cloud but which are not allocated to any album, which is not untypical. Albums are simply virtual containers, so images can be assigned to one or more albums....or none.

So the first thing to try to establish is if any of your "missing" photos are still in your cloud storage (but not assigned to any albums), or are actually not in your cloud library. Open the LrWeb app in a browser window and check the number of images in All Photos, is it the same as the total in All Photos in the Lightroom Desktop app? If so, and there isn't a Sync Errors album in the LrWeb app (it would be shown just below All Photos), then stuck syncing likely isn't the problem.

In which case, to check if any of those 1100 images in All Photos include your "missing" photos, start with an album where you think some images are missing, find an image that was taken on the same day, check the capture date, then in the Lightroom Desktop app use the Date filter and select that date. That will then display all the images in the library which were captured on that date, examine the result to see if any of the "missing" images show up. Let us know what you discover.

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @bfilipiak

Apologies for the delayed response. If the photos are missing from the web version as well, it can be difficult to recover them. If the issue is still not resolved, please try updating to version 9.1. If the problem persists after the update, please share a screenshot showing all photos like this from your Lightroom desktop app. 

Regards,

Srishti

[bfilipiak]

Thile album circled should have about 450 files in it instead of 20.  I have the RAW files backup so it's not a total loss.

Thanks,

Bart

[Jim Wilde]

Yes, I understand that the Album has a lot less photos than it should have, but you haven't addressed the questions that I raised in my first post. Specifically: is there a total mismatch between the Lightroom Desktop All Photos total and LrWeb's All Photos total, and have you checked to see if any of the 1100 images that are not in any album include some or all of the images that are missing from the albums?

Another way to view those 1100 images: click on All Photos, then click in the Search Bar (make sure the Filter icon is not highlighted) and select Album from the list of facets that are shown. In the list of albums that is then produced, scroll to the bottom of the list and click on the entry for "Not in Any Album".....that will populate the grid with all the images that are in the cloud but not assigned to any album. Does that list contain any of the images that you expected to see in one of the existing albums?

[bfilipiak]

Hi Jim, my aplogies, I somehow missed your original response.  I have done as you suggested and have identified the 1,100 photos not assigned to any album and the photos I am looking for are not there either.  At this point I'm wondering if I did somehow inadvertently delete them, but they should be the the deleted lst if I had, right?  These photo were very important to me, which is why I saved the RAWs in multiple places.  I sincerely doubt I deleted them as there are still SOME photos there, just not the better ones.  But especially the ones I had worked on the most and intended to print.

[Jim Wilde]

That's a shame, I had high hopes that the missing photos would be in that set of 1100 unassigned images. But as they are not, I'm stumped.....you are absolutely correct, even if you did inadvertently delete them they should be in the Deleted album. However, deleted images are now only kept in the Deleted album for 30 days (it used to be 60), so is it possible this issue has been going on for longer than the 30 days?

If not, I'm afraid I have no idea about what has caused the issue. It's good that you have backups, but it's still nevertheless very worrying.