Import Reimporting missing photos?

[sandralcoburn]

Lightroom Version Number

13.3

Operating System

1. macOS 14 Sonoma

I recently had a hard drive crash. About 80 percent of my pics were backed up on an external hard drive. Unfortunately, the crash happened as I was switching hard drives so my more recent photos were not backed up.

Fortunately, I still have all of these original photos on their SD cards and my recent LR catalog, which should have the edits. My question is, is there a good way to reimport these photos from their SD card and to map these photos to the Lightroom edits within the catalog?

 

[Hal P Anderson]

Don't reimport. Don't reimport.

I think you can just copy the files to the folders that LRC reckons they're in.

 

[Califdan]

DO NOT RE-IMPORT!

Extending @Hal P Anderson 's suggestion...

Copy the images from the SD cards to a hard drive, then use the "find missing....." tools. Which tool you use (find missing folder or find missing photo) depends on the folder structure that LrC shows for the missing images in the folders panel. if you have, say, one folder per event then when you copy your cards, put the images into one folder per event to mimic what LrC has and use the misisng folder command.

If, on the other hand, you let LrC create one folder per day (as many do) and we're talking about a hundred or more days, this could become quite tedious. In this case you can put the images in single day folders when you copy them from the card and then relink each folder. or you can put the images in one big folder, sort the missing images in the grid by capture date (or filter by capture date) and then relink a day at a time, But, a 3rd option should also be considered. The 3rd option is to remove those images from LrC and Re-import them. But, this option will wipe out everythuing you did with those images in LrC and they'd all be back as they were shot. If that's not a big problem then this would be the preferred solution if the other options are too tedius.

I put in a feature request a little over a year ago which would solve your problem instantly which you can see here
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...k-quot-option-to-import-dialog/idi-p/14540805

Please upvote it and leave a comment about how it would help your particular situation. In your case, if my feature were present, you would just import from the card as you normally do but with the "Re-link missing photos" box checked (that' check box is my idea) and it would add/moove/copy the images from the card as requested but rather than creating a new catalog entry, would point the existing catalog entry to the newly imported image file thus retaining whatwever work you had done on the image in LrC prior it becomming missing.

 

[clee01l]

I put in a feature request a little over a year ago which would solve your problem instantly which you can see here
https://community.adobe.com/t5/ligh...k-quot-option-to-import-dialog/idi-p/14540805

I think your feature request is doable and has a lot of merit. I have given it an upvote.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[Califdan]

I think your feature request is doable and has a lot of merit. I have given it an upvote.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Thanks @clee01l . It seems like is shouldn't be too difficult to implement and would certainly save a massive amount of time and effort.