Lightroom Library Question, help please

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orcas

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Hello,

I am new here and new to Lightroom. I am importing images off of my external drives (3 of them, one at a time) into lightroom and backing them up/putting them onto my main storage external drive. I am not storing photos on my computer as I don't have any room for them all. I hope that makes sense.

Didn't have any problems over the last 2 weeks doing this. Not done yet, so tonight I hooked up my 3rd drive to move photos into LR from and hooked up my main lightroom storage drive and the photos from previous import have ? on them and all the folders on the left side have ? marks. This never has happened before and all the photos are on the LR drive. So I went through the folders and all of them have ? marks. So then I went into my computer, into the drive in question and all the photos are there and filed the way I filed them.

Can anyone shed some light on this and help me resolve this issue?

Thank you so much.

M
 
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Orcas, welcome.

The ?s are Lr's way of telling you that it can't find the image files where it expects them.

If you're plugging and unplugging the drives, Windows has an annoying habit of changing the drive letters.
That will cause Lr to expect to find the files on drive x: when Windows has changed the drive designation to y:

That's probably the most likely cause of your symptoms. If so, two things to try:
1) Use the Windows Computer Management Panel Disk Management snapin application to reset the drive letters, or,
2) Right click on a folder showing the ? icon, then select Find Missing.... and navigate to the new/current folder location. All subfolders should automatically be repaired as well. You will note that the higher up the folder tree you attempt this, the easier the job.

Let us know if that's not what's causing the issue.
 
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To help your drives keep their assigned letters, give them a name. In Windows Explorer, right-click a drive and choose "Properties" in the popup menu. Under the "General" tab, the first box is where you name the drive. For eaxmple, name them EXT1, EXT2 and EXT3 or any name that suits you. Then do as Geoff suggested and assing them fixed letters far enough in the alphabet to let room for card readers USB memory keys etc.
 
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[quote author=Denis Pagé link=topic=8434.msg57151#msg57151 date=125873'657]
To help your drives keep their assigned letters, give them a name. In Windows Explorer, right-click a drive and choose "Properties" in the popup menu. Under the "General" tab, the first box is where you name the drive. For eaxmple, name them EXT1, EXT2 and EXT3 or any name that suits you. Then do as Geoff suggested and assing them fixed letters far enough in the alphabet to let room for card readers USB memory keys etc.
[/quote]Another alternative might be to assign them to A: and/or B:. Unless you have floppy drives, these letters are not being used and will never be selected by windows for other removable devices.

Alternatively, you could create a Home network, purchase a NAS Hard drive enclosure and mount one or more of the HDs in the enclosure. Other USB HDs can be plugged into the NAS and accessd as a NAS drive. Once on the network, you can "Map a Network Drive" and Windows can always reconnect that network location and assign it the same drive letter. For the same reasons regarding removable evices, begin at the end of the alphabet (or use A&B) to allow Windows to automatically assign unused drive letters to 'found' removable devices.
 
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Thank you all...

Yes, that is my problem which I realized last night, so I spent a couple of hours re-figuring the folders to the "new" location. What a hassle because of so many different dates.

Question... If I rename the drive in windows per one of the replies, does that mean I have to go and re-figure the folders again?????? Is there a way to assign a name without having to re-direct the folders in LR?

Thanks again!!
I really appreciate the help and suggestions.

M
 
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It won't affect on Windows because that OS use the letters to find the images. On MacOS tough, Lightroom is using the drive's names as no letters are used. But giving a name to each of your drives may help Windows to know which letter to assign to which drive.
 
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Okay, so I renamed the drive, but looking through the posts here, I couldn't find directions on how to reassign a letter to the drive. I tried to figure it out on my own, but I couldn't. How do I change the letters of the drives? One question and I am using windows..... If I change the letter of the drive, won't that mean I have to re-direct all the folders in LR?

Thanks!! :)
 
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If you follow this advice, you will have only one folder per drive to relink.

To assign drive letters permanently: Go to "Start" right-click "Computer" and choose "Manage". In the left column, choose "Disk Management". Click or right-click a drive to find the "Assign Letter" option.
 
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