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Lightroom shows missing photos and previews

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lyn

Member
Premium Classic Member
Premium Cloud Member
Joined
Apr 30, 2013
Messages
45
Lightroom Experience
Advanced
Lightroom Version
Classic
Lightroom Version Number
Lightroom Classic version: 7.3.1 [ 1167660 ]
Operating System
  1. Windows 7
  2. iOS
Missing photographs
Over a thousand photos (mostly from my iPhone and iPad) show up as missing in my Lightroom Classic desktop catalog. I can find the photos on my iPhone, iPad and on the web but not on my desktop. I have searched my photos folder, my mobile downloads folder, my downloaded smart previews, all old locations with the long numerical name assigned by Lightroom, and literally everywhere else I used Explorer and searched two entire hard drives just to be sure).
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The photos are from a variety of dates.
All Sync Errors
All but 8 of the 421 photos in All Sync Errors are also shown as missing -- the other 8 photos have shown up as 'pending' for over a year and I can't seem to fix this so I just ignore it because it hasn't affected anything other than those photos.

Can I just copy the photos from my iphone etc to a folder on my hard drive and link them to the catalog as with any missing file or will thar really mess things up? Do you have other suggestions?

Thanks!
Lyn
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All message windows indicate that the files are located on the E: drive. That is where you will find them. Is the E:\drive connected? Did Windows assign a different drive letter and the volume is assigned a different drive letter? These are the two most likely reasons for your files to go missing. The other possibility is that you moved, renamed or deleted them from theses locations The first to reasons are easy to solve. The third is going to be more difficult.
 
All message windows indicate that the files are located on the E: drive. That is where you will find them. Is the E:\drive connected? Did Windows assign a different drive letter and the volume is assigned a different drive letter? These are the two most likely reasons for your files to go missing. The other possibility is that you moved, renamed or deleted them from theses locations The first to reasons are easy to solve. The third is going to be more difficult.

E:\mobile downloads was the first place I checked. Also, I have searched my photos folder, my mobile downloads folder, my downloaded smart previews, all old locations with the long numerical name assigned by Lightroom, and literally everywhere else I used Explorer and searched two entire hard drives just to be sure). I have not moved or deleted the files and the originals are on my phone which is why I asked if I could just copy the files from my phone to a folder on E:\ and then link the copied images to the catalog. I can also delete all synced data in preferences but I doubt that will encourage Lightroom to download the originals. Thanks!
 
All message windows indicate that the files are located on the E: drive. That is where you will find them. Is the E:\drive connected? Did Windows assign a different drive letter and the volume is assigned a different drive letter? These are the two most likely reasons for your files to go missing. The other possibility is that you moved, renamed or deleted them from theses locations The first to reasons are easy to solve. The third is going to be more difficult.

Thanks! Drive E is a 1 TB internal hard drive and id where Windows stores "My Pictures" etc and was the default location for LrCC ecosystem images. I changed the default location to an external drive and have searched both locations and more several times. I'm afraid to ask about the third option!
 
From your initial post: "E:\Data\LR Mobile Downloads\" was the location of the file named "APC_0791.dng". This is a different path than what you listed in your second post (E:\mobile downloads). Do you have a folder with the path "E:\Data\LR Mobile Downloads\"? If the missing files(s) are not in that folder, you either deleted the file(s), renamed the file(s) and or renamed the path. You can use Windows Explorer to search for a file named "APC_0791.dng". If you find it we can start to relink to the reference stored in the LR catalog (database).
If you find that you did delete the files or folders, then you need to start recovery from your system backup of critical user data.
 
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