The photos were never gone. LR just couldn't load them due to the lock situation expressed earlier.
mwsilvers wrote:
Its still not clear to me where the missing files were located. Were they on a specific location on the hard drive? On an external drive? Or were they somewhere in the cloud? If they are on the cloud I could easily see how they could disappear, which is why I would never trust important data to some third party's protection, especially without a backup on my end. If they were on the hard drive or an external drive there is no way LR could have spontaneously deleted them. And if deleted, some of them at least would be in the recycle bin. The OP needs to provide us with a lot more detail on the specifics of the computer, and the specific location of the missing files, otherwise this is all guesswork.
Its still not clear to me where the missing files ... (
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