• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Dark mode now has a single preference for the whole site! It's a simple toggle switch in the bottom right-hand corner of any page. As it uses a cookie to store your preference, you may need to dismiss the cookie banner before you can see it. Any problems, please let us know!

LR (OSX) doesn't recognize external SSDs; photos in root drive (/)

Status
Not open for further replies.

ehackett

New Member
Premium Classic Member
Joined
Dec 29, 2019
Messages
16
Lightroom Version Number
6.14
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.15 Catalina
Hello, all,

I have photos on external SSds that I plug in through a USB 3.0 hub (atolla). I recently opened LR6.14, intending to rearrange photos on the SSDs but they were not detected and so unavailable. (This is new--they worked.) Searching for help online I hit upon the explanation that OSX might be assigning different letters to the drives, depending on the order in which they are attached. Looking around for a way to assign durable names to drives, I came upon an article on helpx.adobe.com titled "volumes and drives display under / folder." almost all of my photos--nearly 16000 of them--display under "/." Apparently this is a problem. The remedy begins with moving all the images from / to elsewhere, using Finder. That sounds risky--potentially catastrophic. Has anyone worked through this sort of problem and are willing to offer some guidance?

Thanks and best wishes,

Ed
 
Changing letters is usually a Windows thing, macOS is pretty good with drive names although it trips up network storage from time to time. When you say the drives weren't detected, what can you see? Grab us a screenshot and I suspect we can fix it easily.
 
Here's a screenshot. I restarted LR and it now recognizes the T3 but not the others. Yes, I've got some housekeeping to do, with missing photos and all...I started by hoping to rearrange folders on SSDs.... Thanks again for any advice you can offer!

Best wishes,

Ed
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2021-11-13 at 11.10.53 AM.png
    Screen Shot 2021-11-13 at 11.10.53 AM.png
    207.5 KB · Views: 114
Hmmmm the invalid number for T5 suggests perhaps a little catalog corruption, but let's start with the basics...

First, back up your catalog!!!
Then right-click on the / folder and choose Hide This Parent. Then right-click on Volumes and do the same. Then restart LR and post a screenshot of how it looks then!
 
Got a disk integrity error message when right-clicking "/."

I am running LR 6.14 under OSX Catalina, which I just learned (from elsewhere on this helpful forum) has difficulties that are hard to pin down. I think I will upgrade to LR Classic and see if that solves any part of my problem. THe upgrade seems inevitable as OSX will migrate aware from unsupported (but beloved) LR6.
 
Can you remember the exact wording of the error? Classic upgrade is worthwhile at this point, LR6 is way out of date. If you still have trouble with the catalog after upgrade, send it over and I’ll take a look.
 
Hi,

Thanks very much for your willingness to help...or even just to listen to frustrations.

Here's the message:

An internal error has occurred

Database "/applications/adobelightroom/lightroom catalog lrcat" UNIQUE constraint failed:
AgLibraryFolder.rootFolder,
AgLibraryFolder.pathFromRoot
Statement : INSERT INTO AgLibraryFolder (id_local, id_global, pathFromRoot, RootFolder)
VALUES(?,?,?,?); error code 19)

Thanks, again, and best wishes,

Ed
 
Yep I'm pretty sure I can fix that one but I'd have to return a LR Classic 11 catalog as I don't have a machine that can run LR6 anymore.
 
Great! What do I do next? (And yes, I know I've got a mess of missing folders to find--not sure the right order to do things: fix current problem, upgrade to LR Classic, or find the photos. When i sat down at the computer last Friday I thought I was going to move photo files among drives--I have Windows (FAT) drives for Windows stuff (both legacy and my wife's machine) and Mac OS drives (for Time Machine backup). I was hoping to resituate photos into more sensible groupings, clear them off the Mac HD (which, oddly, seems to be the safest and most accessible place to put photos...till it fills).

Again, thanks very much for your guidance.

Best wishes,

Ed
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top