Dozens of photos gone/vanished/disappeared?

[gNeil]

I don't use the Adobe Cloud version much but I just opened LR CC (2.2.1) on my MacBook (10.14.5 Beta) and only three of my eleven folders have any photos in them!

Typical folders had about fifty images but eight are empty! Same result on my iPhone and in the web browser version.

Was there even a way to back up my 'catalog' locally?  Or restore it from somewhere?

I also keep photos in LR Classic CC so the good news is that I have the images but WHAT HAPPENED?

Wow! Have I lost confidence in this product!

Meanwhile, I turned off the Wi-Fi on my iPad and on my iMac. Both show 600 photos in LR CC. I was able to select and export all but about 50 of the images to a folder on the iMac, so that's a relief. The catalog info is gone and I'm not sure about the adjustments but at least there's an extra copy of most images somewhere.

On the iMac there seems to be LR CC data in ~/Library/

[gNeil]

Okay, I found the "Lightroom Library.lrlibrary" file in ~/Pictures that contains photos and pertinent info. The version on the MacBook doesn't contain near the number of files that the version on my un-synced-to-the-cloud iMac has. I'd be fairly happy if I could figure out how to sync everything up with the iMac version.

Is there a way to 'reset the cloud'?

[selondon]

As far as I know, you’d have to reimport them.

It is strange regarding the disappearing photos though and that they are not in Lightroom Web.

Have you got sync turned on in Classic? And have you removed anything from All Synced Photographs by any chance ?

In Lightroom Web you can delete you whole Cloud Library if you wish.

[gNeil · Accepted solution]

Aha! I have a number of LR CC Classic libraries including a primary one, with others mostly dedicated to various trips but also by some original sources (e.g. Aperture, iPhoto, abandoned PC software). ONE library had sync on and when I just opened it, it matches up with what I'm setting in LR CC and on the Lightroom web: some folders are empty while others are as expected. (I thought I had syncing turned off) A month or so ago I sorted lots of photos into folders (I think I did it on the iPad) and somehow it's 'forgotten' them.

Time Machine has found most of what was 'missing' and others are likely elsewhere -- I haven't yet gone through the list LR CC on the iMac couldn't reproduce. (When I exported the photos from LR CC on the off-network iMac it said that about 50 were unavailable or not sync'd.)

I'm about to leave on a trip so I won't reconcile everything before then nor will I contribute much to this thread while away.

I mostly use LR on my iPhone to get an occasional DNG/RAW image. The editing and organizing tools are very underwhelming compared to LR Classic on a laptop/desktop.

(Answering Johan below, I strongly doubt that the beta MacOS contributed to this but I listed it because -- you never know. Meanwhile, LR in the Cloud/browser shows the same truncated results as the MacBook LR CC -- three folder w/photos and a dozen empty ones.)

[JohanElzenga]

Go to https://lightroom.adobe.com and log in with your creative cloud credentials. Do the online folders contain all the image? If so, then the problem is that for some reason Lightroom CC on your MacBook didn't download them all. You could try what happens if you delete the Lightroom Library.library package from your Pictures folder, so Lightroom will start again fresh.

Another point is that you are using a beta of MacOS. Using beta software, especially something as important as the OS, is always risky. Maybe there is an incompatibility between Lightroom and this MacOS beta, that Adobe is aware of and working on, but an update has not yet been released.