Dave Tribiano

Hi, i am in Lightroom and with My Book Sudio external hard drive. 2017 is illuminated and I can develop those photos. Going back to 2015 and 16 it is not illuminated and I see the photos in Library but they cannot be found in Develop. Never had this problem before. Tried but cannot get them to illuminate so I can work on them. Thank you for your help

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

If you can find them in Library, you can probably re-import them as a last resort. Do you have another program you can use to view them, to make sure they're still on the hard drive? If you moved them, did you do it from Lightroom? If not, that's why you can't get to them.

Also, if you click on one in Library, does it open?

bsprague Loc: Lacey, WA, USA

Can't tell if you have already Imported or not. But, there is a "+" at the top of the folder list where you add folders to Lightroom.

Dave Tribiano

Thank you. I do not have another program and if I moved them I did it by accident. When I click on one in Library it does open

Dave Tribiano

Yes I did import them previously and worked on them last year

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

PC or Mac?

Dave Tribiano

Mac

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

Can't you look at them in Photos or something like that? Just to be sure they're there? I'm surprised you can open them in library and not in develop. Hopefully someone who's a lot better at LR than I am can help. Sorry I can't.

a6k Loc: Detroit & Sanibel

On a Mac, if you can find them in "Finder" you can view them thusly:
1. select one or more and press space bar which will invoke QuickView
2. OR select one or more (not dozens) and "open with" Preview
3. OR double click on one at a time and see what program does open them.
4. yes, you can use Photos but it will want to import them and that's a PITA and not necessary just to view them.

If you can't find them with Finder, make sure you are looking at the correct "Volume". In other words, if they are on a USB attached hard drive, click on that first. On the left side pane you will find what you need, usually. If you don't see what you need there, click on "Go" while Finder is the active application and choose what you need from there.

PM me for more help if you need it. In my experience, Mac is better than even Windows at finding stuff fast. Just leave LightRoom out of it until you are sure that you have them and where they are on the computer.

blackest Loc: Ireland

go to one of your folders in say 2016 right click and select show in finder does that show the physical files.

Lightroom doesn't really work with the physical file very much until you go to export or print most of the time you are looking at a preview in the catalog (think of it as developing a recipe when you have a recipe you like then it gets exported).

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

Glad you chipped in. I'm pretty lost on a mac, compared to Windows. Can't find my way around the
apple file system to save my life.

blackest Loc: Ireland

While there is quite a lot to a macs file system pretty much most of the files that concern you should be in your home folder

e.g /Users/moonhawk/ most of the rest is system files which you shouldn't ever need to touch with other external drives normally you can see them in the side bar in finder double clicking them should open them.

if you had an external drive called 'fred'
it usually would be mounted at /Volumes/fred/
most of the time you don't need to know that.

In the terminal you can drop a file say your file is called my.jpg on your desktop
dropping it in finder
you would see /Users/moonhawk/Desktop/my.jpeg

if you wanted to work on a file in the terminal say its a text file called readme.txt in Documents you can do something like type cd [space] drop the text file on the terminal window and it fills in cd /Users/moonhawk/Documents/readme.txt backspace over readme.txt and you are now 'working in your Documents folder. you then might type nano readme.txt and the text document would be opened in nano.

You could of course have typed nano [space] and dropped the file in

and it would say

nano /Users/moonhawk/Documents/readme.txt and pressing return would open it in nano.

OSX pretty much uses a bsd or unix file system similar to linux. Between finder and spotlight most of the time there is no need to know where anything is as such.

moonhawk Loc: Land of Enchantment

Thanks! (I think!) I'll go over that in the AM when I'm on my Macbook. Right now it's late and I'm in my "Safe Space". (Windows).

I can find things if I can get to the main folder--top of the tree, if you will. But when I open finder, I'm not at the top. I found a back door through lightroom by double clicking on a file and selecting "View in Finder." Once there, I'm fine. Really the only files I want to play with are photos, so I can --and must--organize them only in Lightroom. It's just frustrating when I can't see the file structure like I can in Windows.

Anyway, many thanks for your help.

Jack 13088 Loc: Central NY

DON'T import again! Not now, not ever, NEVER. What has clearly happened is LR lost track of where the original files from previous years are stored.

When you are working in LR it doesn't need to read those files until you develop, export, print... During Import LR made previews (lower resolution compressed versions to show you on screen) that it uses exclusively in the Library module and in fact what you see on the screen in the Develop module. LR never modifies the image in the file original. All of your work is stored in the LR catalog. It is still there. All you need to do is tell LR where they are now. When LR has lost track of the files it grays out the folders in the Folders view in the Library module. BTW that display is totally based on the catalog and is not the equivalent of the view in Finder (mac) or Explorer (pc).

So just close LR and open finder and find the year you want. Then open LR right click on the grayed out year and show LR where to find the file. If you have the year but it is not stored in the same file structure anymore then PM me and I bet we can fix that also.

I keep the current year on an SSD to speed up operation and then annually move it to a rotating disk forever. But then I built my PC expressly for LR/PS optimization.

I apologize for the disorganized stream of consciousness and hope it helps.

So close LR

SusanFromVermont Loc: Southwest corner of Vermont

From what you said, it sounds like the LR catalog is on your computer's HD, and your images are on the xHD. This should not matter, unless, as OP have said, something got moved so that LR cannot "read" the images on the xHD. I will use these locations in my answer to you questions.

In my experience, a folder is grayed out when it is empty or inaccessible. Those images can still be on your xHD, but LR cannot find them.

Try going into the images on your xHD independently of LR. With LR Catalog open, you can compare what is in the different folders. If the images you cannot access are in those folders on your HD, then there is the definite possibility LR just cannot find them. [All file names and extensions should be the same for every image.] Any virtual copies will be represented by an .xmp sidecar rather than an actual image in the LR folder on your HD.

In that case, look at the images in Library and see if there is a small square in the upper right of the border with an "i" in it. If so, click on it and it will let you go to your HD folder and locate the "missing" images. When you find one, LR will also find others that are nearby, so you do not have to do this for every image.

I think this ought to help.

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However, there is another scenario to consider. I am not sure how it happens, but sometimes I have images in the xHD folder that are different from the LR Catalog on my computer HD. These represent various edit versions, or accidental duplications, etc. If what I have said above does not work, you may have to do some importing [even though that should be the LAST RESORT]. When you hit import, it lets you choose which location and which folder to examine. Once you have chosen from one of the files you cannot see in Develop, it will show all the images in that file, those that ARE imported already will be grayed out. Ones that have NOT been imported show up bright. Very important: if you do choose to import them, and then attempt to put them into the appropriate folder, you might get a message that they cannot be put there because they already exist in that location. This indicates that they are on your xHD, but still may not be visible to LR on your computer HD. In that case, the only way that I know to get them back to being visible is to make a small change to the file name in the metadata panel on the right-hand size of the Library. Such as adding a letter or a number separated by a dash -1, -2, etc.

Pretty confusing until you figure it out. This process will let you both see and develop your images. BUT you will end up with identical images in the folder on your xHD that have slightly different file names! It can be very time consuming to go through and identify the duplicates, and to delete the one that is NOT showing up in the LR Catalog. This is one very good reason why importing should be the LAST RESORT. I had a problem like this that developed during the time when I was learning to use LR, and has not occurred again since I got better at organizing things the way I want. Somehow ended up with approximately twice as many images on my xHD that should have been there! Getting rid of those definitely gave me more space! Apparently there are programs that will find duplicates, but I have not tried them, did all my correcting manually a little at a time.