Photos deleted from catalogue only - how to bring them back into the catalogue?

[JaFa]

Hi, I accidently deleted photos from the catalogue (not disk!).

What is an easy way to find those pictures in all the different (disk) folders to reconnect them to the catalogue again?!

[MichelBParis · Accepted solution]

jafa wrote:

Hi, I accidently deleted photos from the catalogue (not disk!).

What is an easy way to find those pictures in all the different (disk) folders to reconnect them to the catalogue again?!

You can import them again... provided you know where to guide the Import process.

If you know the folder they were in, no problem. No problem either if you know the master folder... the import feature will skip the files already in the catalog and import all the other files.

It may be problematic if you don't know the subfolder or at least its master folder... that may import a lot of unwanted files.

If you are not sure, try to import from a folder of an upper level.

Once the import is done, check the files in the last 'import' batch. You should be able to see if the files you are searching are in the batch and to deleted those you do not want. Note that deleting takes time and may fail if you choose too many files to delete (thousands...), so delete smaller batches in that case.

[JaFa]

Thank you so much, you saved me hours of trying to find/match the files! It works as proposed and skipped my roughly 20,000 pictures which were still in the catalogue and presented just the missing ones in the "last import batch".

[MichelBParis]

JaFa wrote:

Thank you so much, you saved me hours of trying to find/match the files! It works as proposed and skipped my roughly 20,000 pictures which were still in the catalogue and presented just the missing ones in the "last import batch".

Many thanks for that info, JaFa.

That possibility is not understood by people absolutely wanting to use the 'watched folders' feature. You can live without it and manually start a targetted search for a folder tree. That's not as slow as one might think. No background process, you choose when you do the search.