Lightroom and Finding Moved Photos: I have moved some older photos from my computer’s hard drive to an external drive, and LR cannot find them. Is there any way for LR to address these...

jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

I have moved some older photos from my computer’s hard drive to an external drive, and LR cannot find them. Is there any way for LR to address these photos without moving them back to my Mac’s hard drive?

Thanks in advance for any help,
John

rjaywallace Loc: Wisconsin

Don’t know any single step to do this, but you need 1) the correct name of the file and 2) the ‘address’ (location of the file). Then from within Lightroom locate the address and the file to tell LR where it is now. Lots of video examples of this common question. Good luck.

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

Perhaps this will help: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

jaymatt wrote:

I have moved some older photos from my computer’s hard drive to an external drive, and LR cannot find them. Is there any way for LR to address these photos without moving them back to my Mac’s hard drive?

Thanks in advance for any help,
John

Did you move them outside of Lightroom? Why not just do an Import from the external drive?

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

All you have to do is "locate" the missing image where now located in a new position. The impacted images should show an exclamation point in the upper right corner of the image when viewed in the grid-view of the Library. Click that icon and then navigate to the correct location. TIP: start from the "All Photographs" view of the catalog and assure the box "Find nearby missing photos" is checked, then when one image is updated, all images "missing" in that folder will be updated in the LR catalog.

via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP

jaymatt wrote:

I have moved some older photos from my computer’s hard drive to an external drive, and LR cannot find them. Is there any way for LR to address these photos without moving them back to my Mac’s hard drive?

Thanks in advance for any help,
John

Having a well-defined image management system is very important to your good mental health when using LR! Know where your images are and where you want them to be prior to moving them or importing them. Once an image/folder is linked to LR ALWAYS move that image/folder from within the application. This prevents the dreaded exclamation point on an image when a link is broken. You can click on the exclamation point to relink the image/folder but you will need to point the application to the new site. Once you do that, the catalog will relink the image/folder in its new location.

steve49 Loc: massachusetts

A lesson I thk everyone has learned over the years. Be careful when you relabel stuff and move pictures around. Saves annoyance later.

mborn Loc: Massachusetts

via the lens wrote:

Having a well-defined image management system is v... (show quote)

mbowman

DWU2 wrote:

Perhaps this will help: http://www.computer-darkroom.com/lr2_find_folder/find-folder.htm

Thanks this is timely information. My external hard drive died and I am currently in the process of restoring all my photos from the backup drive. The Mac says about 16 hours left to go.

AzPicLady Loc: Behind the camera!

I do this all the time because I have so many external hard drives, and they don't always get plugged into the same port. Just click on the question mark beside the file and direct LR to where the image(s) are now. If you actually rename the file, it's not so doable.

Feiertag Loc: British Columbia, Canada

mbowman wrote:

Thanks this is timely information. My external hard drive died and I am currently in the process of restoring all my photos from the backup drive. The Mac says about 16 hours left to go.

I have a "WD" 1 TB external hard drive that is kaput. How did you right the wrong?

BobHartung Loc: Bettendorf, IA

jaymatt wrote:

I have moved some older photos from my computer’s hard drive to an external drive, and LR cannot find them. Is there any way for LR to address these photos without moving them back to my Mac’s hard drive?

Thanks in advance for any help,
John

All I can say is that you are asking for trouble by splitting your image archive across disks. I keep all my images on an external drive (happens to be a RAID 5 array), but you could also do with one large 4 TB or 8 TB drive. Just be sure to have a backup. Best if you have a backup program running in the background (such as Sync Folders Pro if you are on a Mac) so that additions, changes, and deletions are kept up to date with minimal effort.

mbowman

Feiertag wrote:

I have a "WD" 1 TB external hard drive that is kaput. How did you right the wrong?

I had been using two 4TB WD drives on the Mac. One as a data drive primarily for my photos and the other as a backup drive using the Mac Time Machine utility. When the data drive died I turned everything off till I could acquire a replacement. Picked up a new 4TB drive the other evening and set it up on the Mac. Then I just copied the folder of the old drive from the backup to the new drive and hopefully in a few more hours everything will be back to normal.

Never forget to 'always have a backup plan.' But now I'm pondering a backup plan to my backup plan.