kitrn23 wrote:
I recently changed my organizing in LR from folders to collections. There were a few hiccups, but managed to fix problems and now everything was working until I did a import. I followed Scott Kelby's system and imported to a external drive and into LR> Now LR tells me photos cannot be found. They are not in the external hard drive or any where I looked. Did a Locate but still no luck. All I have are the previews which show up in the Previous import box.
Help
Alas, you're mixing a number of terms, making it difficult to understand what (and what not) you're actually doing.
First, collections are entirely virtual and entirely
inside your LR catalog. Nothing gets into any LR collection until the images are first successfully imported into the LRCAT.
Next, folders exist on disk, external to LR. You still
must continue to maintain folders on disk holding your original image files. Whether you view the folder structure inside LR, that's your viewing preference, but still folders will exist in your image management workflow.
These clarifications stated, it seems you're trying a work flow where:
a, you copy your image files from the camera card into a new folder on your external drive.
b, you then start Lightroom Classic and run an import (Add) those images from the external drive into your LR catalog.
c, you organize your images into LR collection(s), where appropriate.
Why your images are not found, we'd have to be there to 'see' the situation as the initial description doesn't have enough detail. Are you missing all images or just new images? If everything is missing, you need to check the drive name / letter for the external drive, both inside and outside the LRCAT. On a Windows machine, disconnecting and reconnecting the drive might cause the assigned letter to change. If LR 'knows' the drive name as 'H', but the drive is currently named 'E', that would explain your problem.
If you're missing just a few 'new' images, just repeat the a-b-c steps above and get them into your LRCAT.