How to direct the catalog to the photos?

[sylvie27]

Lightroom Version Number

13.3

Operating System

1. macOS 13 Ventura

So I was finally able to move my catalog and photos from an external Windows drive to my Mac. For the time being, they will stay on my hard drive until I move them back to an EHD later this year.

All my photos show up under "catalog" with no question marks.
All my collections are showing up.

Problem is: they don't link, so the photos don't show up in the collections
How do I link them up?
I tried to importing them.
Do I need to rebuild sync data?

 

[Rob_Cullen]

How to relink- MISSING FILES & FOLDERS (Lightroom Queen)
Importing files- the absolute wrong thing to do! You may have complicated the catalog and it might be best to restore the catalog as it was in windows (or a recent backup) before you re-link files.
"Sync" is not involved in re-establishing the link with the catalog and local files.

And another link with advice- MISSING FILES AND FOLDERS-(Computer Darkroom)
Move Lightroom to a new computer? | The Lightroom Queen

 

[sylvie27]

Thank you. I looked at some of that before. However...

Under "catalog", everything is there with no question marks and no exclamation marks.
Under "folders" the location of the pictures shows up correctly, the driver is lit up and connected.
Under "collections", I have a hierarchy that looks fine. The only problem is that my pictures are not showing there at all.

I believe the catalog is looking in the wrong place, but where can I fix this?
Under Catalog settings, the location of the catalog is correct.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Under "collections", I have a hierarchy that looks fine. The only problem is that my pictures are not showing there at all.

What kind of collections are these? Normal collections or smart collections? If these are smart collections, then they may contain criteria that are no longer valid, such as a drive letter. If that is the case, then such a smart collection won’t show any photos. To fix that you would need to update these criteria.

 

[sylvie27]

Normal collections, not smart collections. I just figure the catalog does not know where the pictures are and I don't know where I can specify this.

 

[Jim Wilde]

Normal collections, not smart collections. I just figure the catalog does not know where the pictures are and I don't know where I can specify this.

No, it's not a case of the catalog not knowing where the pictures are, it's because the collections are in fact empty.

Interestingly, all the collections in your screenshot are synced collections, but your All Synced Photographs special collection is showing only 124 synced images. Have you by any chance recently cleared out most of the images from your Adobe cloud account? And if so, how exactly did you do that?

 

[sylvie27]

No, it's not a case of the catalog not knowing where the pictures are, it's because the collections are in fact empty.

Interestingly, all the collections in your screenshot are synced collections, but your All Synced Photographs special collection is showing only 124 synced images. Have you by any chance recently cleared out most of the images from your Adobe cloud account? And if so, how exactly did you do that?

So, at a certain point, I had all my photos showing up twice. I'm assuming, the ones from the EHD (now on my main drive) and the ones from the cloud.
I somehow was able to delete the synced photos (don't even remember how I did that).
The photos are still sitting nicely in the cloud (inside their respective albums). Just checked on https://lightroom.adobe.com/.
From my understanding, the collections on my Mac need to link up with the photos in the catalog. And then after I can accomplish that, I can sync with the cloud again and everything should link up nicely. I just don't know how to get to that point.

 

[Jim Wilde]

How many photos do you have in the cloud, i.e. what's the total of All Photos in the LrWeb app (lightroom.adobe.com)?

Something is odd if your albums in the cloud contain photos, whereas the equivalent synced collection in LrC shows empty. Do you have cloud syncing paused in LrC?

 

[sylvie27]

How many photos do you have in the cloud, i.e. what's the total of All Photos in the LrWeb app (lightroom.adobe.com)?

Something is odd if your albums in the cloud contain photos, whereas the equivalent synced collection in LrC shows empty. Do you have cloud syncing paused in LrC?

I currrently have 27603 photos in the cloud.
When I hit the sync button, the amount of photos in my LRC catalog doubles and they do not appear in the collections.
It was my understanding that my collections were linked to the photos on my computer in the first place. Is that not the case?

 

[Jim Wilde]

Can you clarify what mean when you say that "the amount of photos in my LrC catalog doubles" when you hit the sync button? Do you mean that there's an instant literal doubling of the All Photographs total? Or is it the All Synced Photographs total which doubles? Or do both totals increase?

Have you left sync enabled, or is it paused?

Collections are virtual lists of images, akin to a playlist, which are maintained in the catalog. Those lists are mainly managed by the user (by adding and removing images to/from a collection), but a synced collection can behave differently as it would be subject to some sync rules which the user needs to be aware of. It may be those rules have come into play here, but I can't say for certain. First we need to understand how your LrC catalog showed only 124 images in All Synced Photographs, whereas that total should be the same as the total of images in the cloud (i.e. 27K+).

 

[sylvie27]

Can you clarify what mean when you say that "the amount of photos in my LrC catalog doubles" when you hit the sync button? Do you mean that there's an instant literal doubling of the All Photographs total? Or is it the All Synced Photographs total which doubles? Or do both totals increase?

Have you left sync enabled, or is it paused?

Collections are virtual lists of images, akin to a playlist, which are maintained in the catalog. Those lists are mainly managed by the user (by adding and removing images to/from a collection), but a synced collection can behave differently as it would be subject to some sync rules which the user needs to be aware of. It may be those rules have come into play here, but I can't say for certain. First we need to understand how your LrC catalog showed only 124 images in All Synced Photographs, whereas that total should be the same as the total of images in the cloud (i.e. 27K+).

The first person who commented on this post (Rob Cullen) mentioned:
"Sync" is not involved in re-establishing the link with the catalog and local files.

So, I would think I should be able to establish my collections with my local files. (before I even try syncing).
Those 124 images probably showed up when I started syncing and I saw my number of pictures steadily increasing. They should not be increasing.
So, I paused the sync for the time being until I can get my local files to show up in the collections.

Does this make sense?

 

[sylvie27]

So, not knowing what else to do, I hit that sync button.
The system is now stuck at 460 photos. From what I see, these are photos that have never been synced with Classic before.
I closed and reopened LR.
Did a rebuild sync data. Still nothing.
Tried to attach the diagnostic report, but it didn't work. Can't attach html files?

 

[sylvie27]

Diagnostic log

 

[Jim Wilde]

The first person who commented on this post (Rob Cullen) mentioned:
"Sync" is not involved in re-establishing the link with the catalog and local files.

So, I would think I should be able to establish my collections with my local files. (before I even try syncing).
Those 124 images probably showed up when I started syncing and I saw my number of pictures steadily increasing. They should not be increasing.
So, I paused the sync for the time being until I can get my local files to show up in the collections.

I really don't think the local files will show up in those synced collections until the cloud has fully synced. According to the figures you supplied, there are still 27K images to download from the cloud into LrC.

When you had syncing enabled and you saw your number of pictures steadily increasing, we really need to know if it was the All Photographs total, the All Synced Photographs total, or perhaps both?

It's beginning to look like the LrC catalog is not recognised by the cloud as being the original synced catalog, thus the entire contents of the cloud would be downloaded, though in that case it's more than likely that the downloads will be Virtual Copies.

 

[sylvie27]

So I was able to sync everything overnight. There is a green checkmark next to sync.
The result:
All Photographs went up from 28723 to 41384
All Synced Photograps is 12526
Most photographs have now copies
The collections remain empty
So, you are right, they are probably virtual copies. Now what do I do????

 

[Jim Wilde]

I don't know what to suggest next, yet. There's still too much I don't understand about this, the figures you've included make no sense at the moment. I had thought the problem was stemming from the possibility that the cloud sees the current LrC catalog as a new synced catalog, and so doubling up of the total images in the catalog would be possible.....but the figures you are reporting don't fully correlate with that hypothesis. All Synced Photographs should be more or less the same as the total number of images in the cloud, but in fact it's less that half of the total. That could only be the case if the cloud contains something like 15k videos out of the 27K file total. Is that possible?

Regarding the synced collections, if the LrC catalog has fully synced with the cloud then the total number of images in each collection should match the total of the matching album in the cloud....but I assume that's not the case?

 

[sylvie27]

At this point, I don’t even remember all the steps I took during the last week trying to migrate LR, so yesterday I went back to the drawing board and checked the original file names and locations on my old (windows) laptop and EHD.

Since the new Mac computer didn’t recognize the new external drive, I reformated it in exfat and replicated the LR photo album and catalogue folders on the external Mac drive. (the exact same way it was on my old EHD).

Result: number of photos are ok. Photos are showing up in collections, BUT all with the missing photos mark.

So, my next job is to find these photos and link everything up. I’ll be reading up on these “missing photos” tutorials. I'm not planning to sync until I linked all the pictures from my external drive.

Thanks to everyone taking the time to offer suggestions.