whole catalog listed as offline or missing

[Bubba Groos]

I normally use an external hard drive to store all of my Lightroom 2.3 photos. In the field, I imported to a file on my laptop hard drive, and now I cannot access any of the catalog in the external hard drive (greyed-out, with the question mark). I know the files exist because I can access the external hard drive and import the files into Elements, but Lightroom seems to no longer be an option. So sad

 

[Rob Sylvan]

Did Windows change the drive letter of the external drive on you? If so, you can change it back.

Or, you can reconnect the folders/photos to the new drive letter.


If you would also fill in your signature with your operating system and stuff it can be helpful (I'm just guessing you might be on Windows).

 

[Robert T Higaki]

If you are moving files or changing names(of the files) outside of LR, LR will not know where those files are. Thus, the links are broken and you get those question marks.

In order to re-link, click on the question mark icon to open the missing dialog window. click on locate button. Now, the fun part- looking for that particular file( you better remember the picture you were looking at!). Once, you locate the picture- click on it. This should re-establish the link plus the links to other images within the same folder.

Bob- the slide shooter at heart

 

[Bubba Groos]

Thanks to both Rob Sylvan and Robert T. Higaki. In fact I'm using a MacBook with OS X but it did assign a new drive title to the catalog, and I did finally get them to the original drive folder by folder by going through the "find" process with one photo in each folder. Fortunately, it would re-assign all of the photos in that folder along with the one I was "finding." Unfortunately, I was storing my catalog by day, so it was some process. Oddly, it was more frustrating to move the folders that just had one or two photos instead of one where it would move a hundred. Guess I need to take more photos.

Thank you.

 

[Denis Pagé]

Welcome Bubba!

In fact, what you need is to have a top level folder in Lightroom. So, relinking one image relink all images in the whole catalog in a single step! See Victoria's how to...