Hello all very frustrated!

[brenig12]

Hi.
New to the forum and have used lightroom for a few years now. Not an advanced user but can get around fine with great results. Have nice canon 6D and some L glass, but love my little M and 22m. Anyway, am at the end of my tether with Lightroom. All 3000 plus photos are lost all saying cant find files. ? MARKS against every file I have had. What can I do please. Considering moving to new format:

 

[Deleted member 39308]

Hi and welcomes to the forums.

Have you disconnected any external hard drives or moved the original photos to a new location within Windows File Explorer?

 

[brenig12]

. the only thing I have done is add Google photos> I notice that all my back ups are zip files. I believe this is normal/

 

[Ian.B]

1st move is to find the photos on the hard drive
2nd move is to show Lr where those photos are
frustrated/lost photos --- we have ALL been there are some point

 

[Tony Jay]

The simple truth is that the path to your images that Lightroom is expecting is no longer valid.
Lightroom does not store image "within" Lightroom.
Imported images live on a drive somewhere (perhaps several) and as part of the import process Lightroom stores a path (think of it as an address) of each image that is imported.
If the address of your images is changed without Lightroom being aware of this then the affected images will display the ? symbol indicating this reality.

Given that it appears from your post that all images have gone missing simultaneously the possibilities that Ad Astra mentioned are certainly plausible. However there are other possibilities as well.

Possibly the biggest question now is this: can you navigate to your images using File Explorer to confirm their location?
If you can do this then the process of relinking these images to Lightroom becomes a relatively simple process.

However it appears that Google Photos is likely the problem here since it may have hijacked your image collection.
I am not intimately familiar with this application but I did some reading on the web and it appears that it uploads images to the cloud - could this be your issue?

Tony Jay

 

[brenig12]

Thanks for replies appreciate the time you have taken. I have found a lot of my photos in various locations however they are sort of greyed out. On clicking I get a messages stating that the photos appear to be duplicates or that they are in the catalogue! Posted a screenshot of what my lightroom looks like.

 

[Tony Jay]

Hi

All those question marks next to the folders are telling you that Lightroom was expecting to find the folders and images at that location but that they are no longer there...

Tony Jay

 

[Jim Wilde]

Have a look at this blog post from Victoria, it should help:
Lightroom thinks my photos are missing—how do I fix it? | The Lightroom Queen

 

[Wernfried]

Do your folders contain characters "/" and "'"?
I don't think this is very smart, you should avoid this. "/" is the directory separator, Windows even does not permits these characters as folder names. So, I wonder how you were able to put these names into your system.

Also apparently your folders look like "...\Users\Carey's\Documents" resp. "...\Users\Carey's\Music"
Did you change anything regarding "My Documents Folder"?

 

[Johan Elzenga]

The folders do not contain illegal characters as far as I can see. The OP is using the 'Path From Volume' view in the folder panel, so Lightroom shows the entire path and not just the folder name.

 

[brenig12]

Thanks again for all your input. Most important lesson have now backed up the photos found (still cant find many old ones) on separate hard drive.
Still don't really understand what all this means (screen shot added) cos none contain photos and just lead me to blank grey images but still contain some meta data. Come to the conclusion best to delete program and start afresh!

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Come to the conclusion best to delete program and start afresh!

Wrong conclusion, that will not help you much.

That screenshots shows very little, except that you have no less than four catalogs. Three of them will probably be old catalogs, but because each catalog also has a previews.lrdata folder, there is no way to say for sure from this screenshot which one is the latest. Your earlier screenshot shows that Lightroom is using the one that is simply called 'Lightroom catalog', but that may not be the correct one. And your earlier screenshot shows that almost all the images are 'missing', so Lightroom can't ind them and can't rebuild the thumbnails. But again, this screenshot tells us nothing about that.

So try to find an answer to this question: Where are you images? Your earlier screenshot shows that Lightroom expects them to be in dated folders on a path that begins with 'Users\Carey's\Do...' or 'Users\Carey's\Mu...', which makes believe that might be your Documents and Music folders. But because that is not the place to store images, perhaps you moved them?

 

[Ian.B]

Come to the conclusion best to delete program and start afresh!

No; don't do that As per the heading --- Lr can be very frustrating; especially the library section This forum will can get you there.

the 1st thing I do when Lr has lost a connection to a photo is find the photo on the hard drive by doing a search in windows to make sure it is there --- no point Lr trying to find a photo/s if not on the hard drive; or ext disc

get into Lr grid view (G) and hit J until the file numbers/names show on the thumbnails --- note a couple of those numbers/names and search for them via windows --- when you find them note down where they are and go back to Lr. Right click on the thumb nail >> go to 'show in explorer' up near the top of the list >> click on locate >> at the bottom of that window click "find other missing photos" >> use the notes to locate the photo to show lr where the photo is . If you are lucky that will find all the missing photos

You can also locate a complete missing folder by clicking on the folder in Lr and then following the pop-ups

Now go back to the 1st of job of finding the photos

If you cannot find the photos then use the back up files we all should have but many [me too] don't always have
Hope that makes sense and helps ... Lr can be very confusing and very frustrating at times; but that does make it the better if not the best photo filing program available ATM .