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After Updating LR lost almost everything. Smart collections and folders gone

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marisaleigh

New Member
Joined
Oct 28, 2020
Messages
2
Lightroom Version Number
10
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
Hey Ya'll. I've been trying to figure for weeks now. Even hired someone to try and help me and still no luck.

I'll try and be as specific as possible.

I work off a multiple hard drive and keep my lightroom on hard drive too. When lightroom updated It, it had me update the catalog. Once I did that my catalog was there but all I could see were hardrives, folders and smart collections, but no images, all is greyed out with a ?

This is years and years of organizing. Please tell me there is way I can get this back. To find everything individually would take me months.

I appreciate any help so much! I'm loosing my mind.
 
Open the copy of the old catalog that still should be on your drive and see if that catalog still sees everything.

Ideally you should have many catalog backups made in the past and also complete file system backups in Time Machine.
 
Open the copy of the old catalog that still should be on your drive and see if that catalog still sees everything.

Be careful; if you try that with Lightroom Classic 10.0 still installed it's just going to ask you to upgrade that v9 catalog again, perhaps even suggesting you name it "Lightroom Catalog-v10 2" or something, which is going to get confusing very quickly.

Here's the thing:
I work off a multiple hard drive and keep my lightroom on hard drive too. When lightroom updated It, it had me update the catalog. Once I did that my catalog was there but all I could see were hardrives, folders and smart collections, but no images, all is greyed out with a ?

So even when I intentionally rename an image file using macOS' Finder (file browser) so that it goes "missing" from Lightroom, Lightroom still shows the preview and just gives me a tiny exclamation point in the upper right corner of the image warning me the file can't be found. Having the images be entirely greyed out with a question mark implies 1) no previews of the images are available and 2) the images can't be found, either because they were moved, renamed, deleted, or the drive storing them wasn't plugged in.

Marissa, it would be helpful if you could triple-check that the image files still exist on the hard drive in question, that the hard drive is plugged in, and that the files are where Lightroom expects them to be. Perhaps sharing a screenshot or two of your problem would be helpful as well.

Regarding your collections, Lightroom has a bug where sometimes it doesn't show all your collections upon startup. They are still there, just not shown. I find that collapsing and re-expanding the collections panel section, along with clicking around on any collections that are still shown, will force the rest to show.
 
Thank you. I have tried to reinstall the older versions of lightroom and it still does not work. They were all there a couple weeks ago but now many of the folders that use to be uploaded on the drives are no imported. I'm going to try and upload everything again and maybe they will show up? Fingers crossed.
 

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The title of the thread is wrong, that gave people the wrong idea about your problem. Your smart collections aren't gone, you have actually selected one in the screenshot! No doubt your folders will also be there if you scroll up in the left panel.

Your images are 'missing'. This can happen if the name of their folder or the name of the disk has changed, or if you moved them (outside of Lightroom). Reinstalling Lightroom won't help, but if you know where they are, this should be easy to fix: Lightroom thinks my photos are missing—how do I fix it? | The Lightroom Queen
 
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