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joelroffman

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Premium Classic Member
Joined
Jun 12, 2015
Messages
47
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
LR Classic 9.0
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.14 Mojave
Hi All,
I use LR Classic 9.0. I have had all my photos on my Mac, and decided to transfer most to an external hard drive in order to free up space on my hard drive. I transferred my 2011 and 2012 photos successfully (around a thousand files). All was fine with the LR files that remained. After transfering more, something awful seems to have happened. When I now open LR, the only way I can find my photos is to "import." No folders and no collections are visible - just a directive to import photos. And when I do so, I now have two versions of the imported photos, and the folders are still not seen. I obviously goofed in some very major way. Is there any way I can change the LR display to show the files I have on my hard drive? Please help.
Thanks!
 
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DO NOT RE-IMPORT ANY MORE OF THE PHOTOS INVOLVED IN THIS ISSUE UNLESS WE TELL YOU TOO - You'll only make things more complicated.

Before we can give you an answer we need to know how you transferred the images from your internal drive to the external drive (Using Finder or using LR Classic)?

Also, when you launch LR/Classic, do the folders you did not move show up OK (no "?" on the folder name)?

You may have two problems, one could be using a wrong catalog, possibly caused by you moving the catalog to the external drive along with the images, and the other is moving the images with Finder.
 
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I used LR to transfer
The unmoved folders show up ok

Thanks for your response. Seems I really screwed up.
Please advise how to find and get back the correct catalog
 
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Quick query Joel - you said " no folders and no collections are visible" but you also said "the unmoved folders show up ok". Were the unmoved folders showing up ok when "something awful" happened, or only since you imported them again?
 
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Only if I click on "import" at the bottom of the screen will all the unmoved folders appear. As I mentioned, if I then click on one or more of those, I will have two copies of the images, but those copies will still only appear if I click on "import" again.
 
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Show us a screen shot of the left side of the Library Module, not the Import screen.
 
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The top screen shot is what I see when I open LR (after I unfortunatley imported some images). The bottom is what I see after I click "import." You can see that the bottom image shows my folders on the left side and is in the desired format. The top screen shot merely shows the now-duplicated images with no folders, etc. Also, the images seem to be in a random order.
Thanks!
 

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Ok, as Califdan said, don't reimport. Somehow you've ended up in an empty catalog. You just need to find and open your normal catalog. The File menu > Open Recent would be a great place to start looking, or otherwise search your computer for files ending with .lrcat if you don't know where you store your catalog.
 
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