Lightroom catalogue missing photos

KongKurs · May 4, 2015

Hi y'all

My father is having serious issues with his LR catalogue (version 4).
It seems that in the "recent catalogues" menu, there's two catalogues:

One that's the main LR4-cat, located in the documents&settings folder,
and one that's seemingly a backup catalog from last year (?). The weird thing is, that the first catalog is containing the latest develop settings for all his photos but pretty much no photos (question marks all over), and the latter is missing a lot of his develop settings, but contains all his newest photos. That means, the latter catalog is "complete", but misses a lot of his catalog settings for his photos, meaning that a lot of hours of work is lost.

What I then thought I could do, was load the catalog with all settings, and then just locate one of the missing folders, and then LR would automatically locate the rest. But no. It doesn't work that way. It's looking for his photos in the drive "E:", but his drive is "F:". If I locate one folder at "F:", it just moves this folder unto the drive, meaning that "E:" still misses 99% of all photos, and "F:" just contains this sole folder.

I have two questions:
1. What can I do to solve this the best way?
2. Why is LR even mixing a last-year backup catalogue into the equation? My father surely hasn't actively navigated unto his backup folder and chosen this oddly dated backup... I'm a little afraid that I can use hours of solving this, only to possibly face the same issue again in a near future...?

Dave442 · May 4, 2015

On a Windows machine I go in and set the external drive letter to the drive letter that LR expects to the photos for the catalog that was opened. Haven't had this problem yet on the Mac.

On a Windows machine if the files are on an external drive it is very easy for the computer to assign a different drive letter if you do not go in and tell it to always use the same drive letter for that drive. The usual cause is that he connected external drives in a different order.
Now that you have sent some over to the other drive letter you will have to bring them back when you change the drive letter back to the "E" that LR expects and not the "F" that Windows decided to give the drive on this day.

Recommend you check for your version of Windows on how to assign a drive letter to an external drive.

KongKurs · May 13, 2015

I've been messing with the drive letters earlier, not sure it's this that's the problem.
So, the new situation is this:

We decided to export the catalog to a new, with a "fixed" name, and set Lightroom to always open this catalog - it was set to open the latest, meaning that it'd open a previous backup of a catalog - that seems like a wrong setting?!

My question now is:

Since there's still a lot of develop settings missing for a bunch of photos, is there a way to get these from the catalog that's missing the photos themself? Merge catalogs? Copy paste settings from one catalog to another?
Is there a way to do this?

Dave442 · May 13, 2015

Yes, you can use the Import from another Catalog option in the LR File menu. I only did a test with a simple catalog of two photos and it worked. I would make a backup of all your catalogs before importing a catalog into your current catalog.

I did a quick test and made two catalogs, Test 1 and Test 2.
Catalog Test 1 with two photos and no develop settings done to the photos.
Catalog Test 2 with the same two photos and a number of steps done in the Develop module (crop, B&W conversion, spot removal, adjustment brush, etc).

For Catalog Test 1: the catalog was kept on my local hard drive and the actual image files were in another directory on the same local hard drive.

For Catalog Test 2: the catalog was placed in the same directory as Catalog Test 1, however the image files were on an external drive that was disconnected after making the adjustments in the Develop Module. Opening this catalog without the external drive connected gave the message that the image file could not be found and no changes could be done to the photo, but in the Develop Module the Develop History was all there.

Steps:
1) I opened my Catalog Test 1 that had the two photos on my local hard disk, but with no Develop settings.
2) I used the "Import from another catalog" and selected Catalog Test 2 (with the external drive still disconnected).
3) Selected the option to Import with all Metadata and Develop settings.
4) Selected option to keep old as copy (Note: this just made a stack so it may have been better to not select this option).
5) The photos in my Catalog Test 1 were then updated with all the Develop Settings that had been done in the Catalog Test 2.

The_Traveler · May 14, 2015

This looks like a situation where photos were moved outside of LR and/or drive letters changed intermittently for no particular reason.
(This might happen if you have a USB drive or reader with that is opened intermittently and has a drive letter lower than the hard drive.)

I suggest that you stabilize the hard drive letters by assigning them a static drive letter. How to change the drive letter assignment in Windows 8 7 Vista XP or 2000

e.g. I have assigned a static drive letter to my USB3 backup drives.