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Catalogs I need help finding my catalogs & photos.

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Photo Phil

New Member
Joined
Dec 16, 2018
Messages
5
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
5.x
Lightroom Version Number
5
Operating System
  1. Windows 7
Hello Group,

Here is my issue I have over 49,600 pictures but none of the catalogs for these photos are showing. 20181218_194901_resized.jpg I have tried to restore my photos with "locate" photos, 20181218_200941_resized.jpg 20181218_200953_resized.jpg after I do that I click on "locate" to find my photos, then I see this 20181218_202454_resized.jpg I see "Phil's mini mac" but I don't see "My Lightroom photos" instead I see my backup copies, I'm at a standstill with this. I didn't do anything to create this issue like deleting photos or renaming folders; the only thing I did was process photos one day and the next day I came upon this issue. I have 2 external drives they are both working fine. I'm using "macOS 10.12 Sierra" with Lightroom 5; any help with finding my catalogs and photos would be greatly appreciated.
 
You have a very strange issue going on. Lightroom reports that it expects 49454 images to be in your Time Machine backup. That is obviously the wrong place for original images, but that is what Lightroom says. But things are even worse. Lightroom can not find these images anymore, and that could be because Time Machine can delete old backups without any user intervention...

Your images should be (or have been) somewhere on your internal hard disk as well, because otherwise Time Machine would not have made a backup of them. However, it's possible that you deleted those images from your internal hard disk some time in the past, and that would explain why Time Machine has now also deleted them from the backup...

What you need to do is search your internal disk for the images. You can do that in the Finder. Just look at the name of one of the images in Lightroom, switch to the Finder (or use SpotLight) and search for that image by name. Let's hope you will find something...
 
You have a very strange issue going on. Lightroom reports that it expects 49454 images to be in your Time Machine backup. That is obviously the wrong place for original images, but that is what Lightroom says. But things are even worse. Lightroom can not find these images anymore, and that could be because Time Machine can delete old backups without any user intervention...

Your images should be (or have been) somewhere on your internal hard disk as well, because otherwise Time Machine would not have made a backup of them. However, it's possible that you deleted those images from your internal hard disk some time in the past, and that would explain why Time Machine has now also deleted them from the backup...

What you need to do is search your internal disk for the images. You can do that in the Finder. Just look at the name of one of the images in Lightroom, switch to the Finder (or use SpotLight) and search for that image by name. Let's hope you will find something...

Since I'm not having any luck resolving my issue, what you happen if I reinstalled Lightroom?
 
Phil, Re-installing Lightroom will not help at all.
Your problem is 'missing' your original camera files. Until you can find those or a copy of the files from another backup, your problem remains.

If your "original" files are totally gone, I can only sympathize.
As a last resort there are programs that can extract lower quality jpgs from the Lightroom previews. Ask for advice.
 
Phil, Re-installing Lightroom will not help at all.
Your problem is 'missing' your original camera files. Until you can find those or a copy of the files from another backup, your problem remains.

If your "original" files are totally gone, I can only sympathize.
As a last resort there are programs that can extract lower quality jpgs from the Lightroom previews. Ask for advice.
thank you for your reply.
Could someone please give me step-by-step instructions on how find my "original" files.
 
We don’t know where your images are. Please read my answer again. Lightroom expects your original images to be inside your Time Machine backup. That is of course very odd. Original images should be on your hard disk, and Time Machine makes a backup of that. The additional problem is that apparently the images are no longer in Time Machine either. That is why they are now missing. I fear that means they are gone completely, but the only way to know this for sure is search by file name in the Finder.
 
We don’t know where your images are. Please read my answer again. Lightroom expects your original images to be inside your Time Machine backup. That is of course very odd. Original images should be on your hard disk, and Time Machine makes a backup of that. The additional problem is that apparently the images are no longer in Time Machine either. That is why they are now missing. I fear that means they are gone completely, but the only way to know this for sure is search by file name in the Finder.
I'm not understanding this "Just look at the name of one of the images in Lightroom, switch to the Finder (or use SpotLight) and search for that image by name." How do I find the name of one of the images in Lightroom? Thank you.
 
The error message in one of your screen-clips gives one image name - M&B.....227.DNG
Try searching your entire computer system for that image.
You should still see the filename of a selected photo above the filmstrip, or in the metadata panel.
You could even try a general search for *.DNG files.
 
I'm not understanding this "Just look at the name of one of the images in Lightroom, switch to the Finder (or use SpotLight) and search for that image by name." How do I find the name of one of the images in Lightroom? Thank you.
 

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The error message in one of your screen-clips gives one image name - M&B.....227.DNG
Try searching your entire computer system for that image.
You should still see the filename of a selected photo above the filmstrip, or in the metadata panel.
You could even try a general search for *.DNG files.
Note the file name may be invalid. Ampersand (&) is a reserved character in some filesystems. Lightroom is multi platform and is coded to accept only valid file names in ALL systems. This could be part of the problem here.
 
Phil, Re-installing Lightroom will not help at all.
Your problem is 'missing' your original camera files. Until you can find those or a copy of the files from another backup, your problem remains.

If your "original" files are totally gone, I can only sympathize.
As a last resort there are programs that can extract lower quality jpgs from the Lightroom previews. Ask for advice.

I'm interested in find one of these programs that can extract lower quality jpgs from the Lightroom previews. Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.
 
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