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Uh oh... Something is not good

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morri15

New Member
Joined
Apr 5, 2018
Messages
18
Location
Sydney, Australia
Lightroom Experience
Intermediate
Lightroom Version
Lightroom Version Number
Classic 7.3
Operating System
  1. macOS 10.13 High Sierra
Hi there
When I insert a Card and go to Import a set of new pictures to Lightroom, as the process begins, a whole lot of old images appear, and are replaced one at a time by the new images. I suspect the file naming of the new files is actually the file names of the old files, which have now disappeared. (They are in a backup). All the files are in a single large Catalogue
I thought that new imports would receive unique file names!!
I think I have overwritten about 100 images and cant even work out which ones they were.
What is going on here?
 
Hi morriyoung, welcome to the forum

When you say "as the process begins", this is the thumbnails in the Import dialog? And are these old images still on the card or have they been deleted? And if they were deleted, how did you delete them?

Lightroom should never overwrite files on the hard drive, so I wouldn't panic about that immediately unless you can reproduce it.
 
Hi Victoria and thanks for the welcome and taking an interest in my question and anxiety.
You are correct, that as I load the Card and then click the Import dialog, the old images appear as a thumbnail grid. The same number of thumbnails of old images appear as the number of images I am about to import, and they one-by-one change to the new images as the import takes place.
I am using a card that has recently been formatted in the camera. I have taken to formatting the card regularly so as not to re-import deleted duplicate files.
One thing I should add is that this has happened twice now, and its following the acquisition of a new camera (Fuji X-H1). Never seen it before.
I have a horrible feeling its about the file naming, and the old images may have been over-written. I might need to go the backup and try and locate the images one-by-one to match the overwriting file names.. AGH!!
Morri
 
I have a horrible feeling its about the file naming, and the old images may have been over-written. I might need to go the backup and try and locate the images one-by-one to match the overwriting file names..
If every time you reformat the camera card, the new images begin from the same IMG_0001, IMG_0002 etc file names, then you can change that to continuous numbering in camera setup and the sequence will not repeat until 10,000 images.
 
Thanks...
Most recent import is for file with filename DSCF0703.RAF so I think the continuity of the file names is going on...
I have done a search in Catalogue now for all files, and there are two files with this filename... the new one and the one I thought it replaced.
They are both there, but the older file was converted to dng while 'the original name' is the .RAF file..
I think Victoria is right.. they are all there, but some have converted to dng and so the new file name is using up a 'freed up' file name (or something!)
Does that make sense.
I think I can sleep again.
 
Perhaps it is time to move to a new file naming system upon import.
I like and use the format Date - text name -sequence number that LR can easily do upon import.
This should eliminate the problem you have encountered.
If I have two independent shoots on the same day, in the same location that I might use for text name, all I have to do is restart the sequence number at higher number than when I finished.
And even if I screw up, LR will resequence with a -1 number, ie, 75-1 so file names remain unique.
 
I always import with YYYYMMDD- prefixed to the camera's original filename, which avoids a heap of potential filename-related issues - especially as my more recent D810 file imports started out with the same filename sequence as my earlier D3's imported files.
 
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