Re-importing photos and exclamation marks

[inmyprime]

Hi, I am trying to clean up and merge all my 7 catalogues/libraries and import some photos from iphoto as well in process, so that all my photos are in one place and in one catalogue. In any case, it seems that not all the photos that are inside my LR library folders also show up in my catalogue. The previews in My Collections show many photos with an exclamation mark/missing link. While I can locate the master photos in the folders themselves from outside of LR, I can't quite figure out how to re-establish links to all the missing previews (this catalogue has about 100k photos) without going through every single photo manually....
There may also be many photos that are neither in My Collections nor in the LR catalogue but still residing in the folders themselves. Is there an easy way of re-importing everything without duplicating and creating more exclamation marks and messing up My Collections? (there are many ratings, not to mention processing itself etc that I really need to keep!)

Today I tried reimporting all the master files, Import -> Move -> and checking "Don't import Suspected Duplicates" and it seems that not all photos were imported into the catalogue (as there are still exclamation marks on some of my folders in My Collections). Perhaps LR discarded all the files with a similar/same file names, I am not really certain why it hasn't imported everything.
Is the right way to do it to uncheck "Don't import Suspected Duplicates"? I worry messing up the catalogue and losing My Collections structure as well as the edits (which I somehow did manage to mess up, previously. I then had to get a copy of the Catalogue file from a backup disk but some of the master files are not linked up properly with the collections folder/previews). Sorry, I hope I managed to explain my problem more or less clearly...it is late and I have been at my catalogues for about a week now...This is 16 years worth of photographs and I am paranoid to mess things up.

I suppose what I am unclear about is:
- If I delete the folders from LR with photos in them, will this delete the master files or just remove them from the LR catalogue?
- and if I delete all the folders from LR, will this automatically delete all my edits and collections and basically wipe the catalogue file clean? I can't really work out how to re-import stuff without duplication and get rid of the exclamation marks...

 

[Johan Elzenga]

OK, no hard feelings. The perceived tone of a written message can indeed be different for the reader compared to how it was meant by the writer, and I realize I have a rather 'direct' style of writing. The problem is always that you can't really retrace your steps exactly, so you tell it the way you think it happened. The other party (me, in this case) knows that certain things simply can't have happened like that, but it doesn't mean they know exactly what did happen either. So we're both guessing based on what we know, and even more on what we don't know.

 

[info_25]

First point: an exclamation mark simply means that Lightroom has lost track of the original image. Because the image is still in the Lightroom database, you can't solve this by reimporting it.

Deleting folders or individual images from Lightroom does not delete the images from the disk, but you do lose all your edits so that's not a good idea. If you 'reconnect' an image by clicking on the exclamation mark and then locate the image in the dialog that follows, you can check an option to also reconnect 'nearby images'. That can be a life saver. Any missing image that is still in the correct hierarchy will automatically be reconnected too, so in theory you could reconnect all misskng images by just reconnecting one. In practice it probably will take a bit more work, but it might still go faster than you think.

Also check for entire missing folders (these have a question mark and are dimmed). You can reconnect these in the same manner, by right-clicking on the folder and choosing 'Find Missing Folder'. If you do that with a missing top folder, the entire hierarchy will be reconnected in one click.

I have the problem too and thought this was a solution until I went to where the image is supposed to be located Lightroom Catalog.lrcat and it is greyed out and won't let me select it. I have a new computer and in trying to use Lightroom every image in the catalog has an exclamation point. How do I find my images?

 

[Rob_Cullen]

How do I find my images?
1) YOU have to know where your image files are stored on your computer drives- Use Finder/File-Explorer to find the image files by a search.
2) The Folders shown in the Lr-Classic Folder panel must match exactly the location where YOU store your photos. If they do not match- they will show as 'Missing' ? marks and ! marks on the photos.

Read this full article in the link to make the Catalog database (Folders) re-link to the Folders where YOU know they exist.
MISSING FILES & FOLDERS

 

[info_25]

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate it. I wish I knew where my images were stored. I have always imported them through a program. iPhotos, then Aperture, now Lightroom. They go wherever those programs put them. I have no idea where that is. In finder I see a few random folders (Italy trip), some year folders 2015 - 2018, a bunch (maybe 200?) single images, and some Lightroom folders: One called Lightroom, which contains backups (last one 10-27-19 right before my old computer crashed), Lightroom Catalog Previews.Irda, Lightroom Catalog.lrcat (not greyed out in Finder) and Lightroom folders, with has only 5 of my hundreds of actual folders in Lightroom itself.

One LightroomMasters with the years 1998-2016, and in each of those 12 more folders, which I assume are months?. None of this makes sense to me. Does it to you? It's all so random. Perhaps each software I used put the photos in different places?

I am not a techie person. Something I searched yesterday told me to click the exclamation point on one of my photos and click yes when asked if I wanted to find it. I was then to find my lrcat file and click that, but the lrcat file is greyed out.

I also have an external backup of ALL my photos, even the bad ones, yikes. Is there a way to use that? I imagine I would lose all my LR edits. I'd really rather just have my old LR photos back like they were on my old computer.

 

[LRList001]

Eventually, yes you can get all your photos back as they were on your old computer, if you have got both full backups of the photos and you have the LR catalogue. Sounds like you do at least have the catalogue. As you are using the word 'iPhoto', I am probably not best placed to help you as that was an Apple Macintosh product, and I use Microsoft's Windows. However, the basics are very similar.

How did you get your photos (not the catalogue) from the old computer to the new one?
Do you know that has been done at all?
If it has been done, how many disk drives do you have fitted to your computer, what are they called?
Do you keep your photos on an external hard drive (EHD)?
Somehow, you have to find where the photos are. Hence, use the Finder to locate the file name of a photo you know you have somewhere on your computer. LR will tell you file name. Click on one of the exclamation marks ("!" character) and LR will tell you where that photo used to be as well as its name. The name is what you must search for using the Finder. Somebody else will have to give you detailed instructions on how to use the Finder and how disks are labelled on an Apple Mac computer.

I-see-light has given you a link to a page of information telling you how to find your photos. Until you have worked through the steps in that and tell us what results you get at each stage, it really isn't going to be possible to help you further.