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Missing photos

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AlexR

Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2014
Messages
55
Location
Radnorshire, UK
Lightroom Experience
Beginner
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Classic 11.4.1
Operating System
  1. macOS 12 Monterey
Help - I recently upgraded to a newer iMac as my old one was full and running slowly. This involved going from LR6 on the old computer to LR Classic on the new one, and copying everything across (about 50,000 images. This mostly went very smoothly, all edits etc transferring properly. However about 5000 images went awol in the process. The originals are of course still safely on the old computer (and on the backup drive) - my question is, how do I find these and copy them safely across without re-importing and so losing the edits?
Thanks, Alex
 
Lightroom Classic should show them, and probably their folder as missing. First (in the Finder) copy the folder to the new computer if that has not been done. Then right-click on the missing folder in Lightroom, choose 'Find Missing Folder' and select the folder in the dialog that follows.
 
Thanks. However the relevant top-level folder contains many sub-folders. All the sub-folders have copied across correctly - none show as missing - and the missing images seem to be distributed randomly among the sub-folders - a couple missing from one sub-folder, a dozen from another, etc.

Alex
 
Unfortunately they're definitely not on the new disk, though they are still safely on the old computer and also on its backup disk (an external drive). I'm wondering whether there's any way I can move them across en masse in their top-level folder to the new computer, which would of course mean also moving a lot of images that have already been safely transferred once. Grateful for any ideas!

Alex
 
Just move all the images. MacOS will tell you that some image already exists in that location and ask you if you want to override it. Say you don’t want that and check the option to do this for all existing images. That means only the missing images will get copied over.
 
Thanks! And will Lightroom then recognise the moved images as being in their correct original locations?
Yes. If the images are where Lightroom thinks they should be, then you do not have to do anything else.
 
Yes. If the images are where Lightroom thinks they should be, then you do not have to do anything else.
"where Lightroom thinks they should be" is the image file path stored in the Catalog file. That path is displayed in the Folder panel and is referenced whenever Lightroom Detects a missing image file.
 
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