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thomasa15113263
Participant
March 12, 2019
Question

Updating local photo indices

  • March 12, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 677 views

Hi,

i had to make a recovery of my MacOS after a failed update to MacOS Mojave and did so by the latest backup i had of my mac.

Now i don't have access to my pictures - first Lightroom tried to sync originals from the cloud as the original drive is online, which it did for a day without any result. I then changed the folder to the folder on the drive on the recovered harddrive. Now it has been "updating local photo indices" for 30 hours and it does not seem to get anywhere closer to completion - even as it should only take a few minutes...

Anyone who has an idea how long it will take? The catalog folder is 232GB big.

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    99jon
    99jon
    Legend
    March 12, 2019

    Are you overwriting the existing local storage folder or creating a new folder. What is showing in Preferences for the local storage file path?

    Is it located on an internal drive or external hard drive?

    T
    thomasa15113263Author
    Participant
    March 12, 2019

    Thank you for your reply.

    I am overwriting the existing local storage folder. Preferences is showing “Macintosh HD”/Users/[myusername]/Pictures/Catalog

    It is located on an internal drive

    T
    thomasa15113263Author
    Participant
    March 17, 2019

    I have no personal knowledge of this but I’m assuming the indexing is attempting to replace the previous links and match up with the existing files which could be the reason for the slowness.

    You could create a new empty folder and point to it in preferences and simply let new copies download from the cloud.

    If you have insufficient space, then trash or archive the existing folder, perhaps to an external drive as an additional backup. A backup would be the safest as local copies are linked to the cloud files. Normally deleting local copies also deletes the original from the cloud but i'm guessing your local copy links are mainly to the old OS structure.

    You could check what is in the cloud by logging-in to your browser app.

    https://lightroom.adobe.com/


    Unfortunately it did not work out. I tried to make the new folder in finder and in the prompt in Lightroom Preferences, both resulting in that it "updates the local photo indices" for hours again.

    I also tried to tick off the "Store a copy of all originals at the specified location" and Lightroom still start on "updating the local photo indices".

    On my laptop i was selecting some pictures for a printed album an putting them in a folder in Lightroom, they are not being synchronized to my desktop computer on which the problem is occuring. The album is in the cloud.

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