# Question Marks on my picture folders?



## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 15, 2013)

Hey guys I don't know what happened but all of the sudden after closing and reopening LR4 all my folders had question marks next to them and LR5 isn't able to locate my photos. I DID NOT MOVE OR CHANGE FOLDER NAMES AT ALL. i was simply trying to locate my orginal Raw files not the exported versions and when i went back into LR all my folders with different dates had question Marks on them. 

Please Help!


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## Mark Sirota (Jun 15, 2013)

Don't panic, and don't re-import!  What this means is that the folders are no longer where Lightroom thought they were.  Right-click on the top-level missing folder and choose "Find Missing Folder..." from the context menu.  Navigate to the proper location for that folder, and you should be good to go.  Repeat for any other top-level missing folders.


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## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 15, 2013)

Mark I appreciate the help but unfortunately this isn't working for me. Every time i click on find missing folder and i select the correct one with the same date on it, it just creates a new one at the bottom it has no ? mark on it but there are still no pictures inside them. Also i opened a back up catalog and there all the catalogs have no ? mark on them and the pictures seem to be all there but LR can not create a preview, when i click on one picture i go to under develop it says "Missing or Offline" any other suggestions i know you say do not re-import...


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## Mark Sirota (Jun 15, 2013)

Could you please post a screen shot of your Folders panel before and after you do a Find Missing Folder? I think it would help if we could see what you're seeing.


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## LanceH (Jun 15, 2013)

LR5 changed the question mark to an exclamation mark.  personally I preferred the question mark (seems more appropriate to me).


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## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 15, 2013)

Mark Sirota said:


> Could you please post a screen shot of your Folders panel before and after you do a Find Missing Folder? I think it would help if we could see what you're seeing.


Ok I'll post it in a couple of hours when I get home.


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## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 16, 2013)

Mark Sirota said:


> Could you please post a screen shot of your Folders panel before and after you do a Find Missing Folder? I think it would help if we could see what you're seeing.



Even better i made a video.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/msj71c65xak77pb/Video Jun 16, 2 16 46 AM.mov


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## Mark Sirota (Jun 17, 2013)

Okay, thanks, the movie is helpful. The interesting thing here is not that the folders are missing -- what's interesting is that they all show a file count of zero.

Do you have catalog backups? Can you go back to the most recent backup before this started and see whether all looks well there?


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## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 17, 2013)

Hey Mark check out what happens when i open my backups. looks like the pictures are there but it won't generate previews or open them.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ihuth586ioen3yh/Video Jun 17, 12 45 15 AM.mov


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## Jim Wilde (Jun 17, 2013)

That second movie is entirely logical. When Lightroom does a catalog backup it doesn't also backup the associated previews (which are stored in a separate sub-folder alongside the catalog file). So when you open a backup catalog then there are no previews to show, hence grey boxes to start off with. But because the folders and images are still "missing" Lightroom cannot then auto-generate a preview, so the thumbnails remain grey.

I'm more puzzled by the first movie. It may be a difference between Mac and PC, but on a PC when doing a "Find Missing Folder" it's not possible to open the target folder to reveal the contents as is the case in your movie. Question for Mark, really....is that expected behaviour on a Mac?


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## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 17, 2013)

when i do the find the missing folder on the backup catalog it finds the folders but not all of the pictures are there just some of them. This is so weird.


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## Aldo Ferrari (Jun 19, 2013)

should i re-import?


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## Mark Sirota (Jun 19, 2013)

Sorry for the delay in replying. If it were me I'd still not re-import; I still feel like recovery is possible here, but I don't have a complete understanding yet. If you're in a hurry, then perhaps re-importing (and re-doing whatever work needs to be done) is possible, but you'll have work to re-do and cleanup to be done if you do that.

As Jim said, there's nothing surprising about that second video. The question is, why is the 2013 folder found, but the dated subfolders missing? If you right-click on that 2013 folder and choose "Show in Finder", it should open the Finder with that folder selected -- are there subfolders in there?


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