# Migration to Lightroom from Classic failed, I think



## fbx33 (Apr 29, 2020)

Sorry to bring  up this must-be-tiresome problem, but I have about 28,000 photos in Classic using about 150 GB on disk. I started a migration from Classic to Lightroom day before yesterday. In doing this I did not have enough room on my Macbook Pro's internal SSD to make copies of all photos, so I added an external SSD with 500 GB free (newly erased and reformatted to current Mac OS), and set that as the site for the copies of my Classic photos to be placed en route to Lightroom.

I just checked after 48 hrs or a little less and the external SSD has 1.5 GB of space used, i.e., next to none of the 150GB of full size pictures are being moved to the external drive in 48 hours.

Thus I conclude that my "migration" has failed and I must do something different if I hope to actually get the pictures migrated from Classic to Lightroom.

Note #1: I already have "smart previews" in Lightoom of most of the pictures. Don't know if this has any effect on migration.
Question #1: How to I CANCEL the previous migration and start over, if this is most effective response to situation?
Question #2: Wouldn't it be easier just to copy/export the 28K of Classic files to the external HD and then IMPORT them from the external SSD into Lightroom online?

Please help here as I seem to have hit wall.


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 29, 2020)

What shows in Lightroom? Is the migration dialog still showing?


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## fbx33 (Apr 29, 2020)

Nope. Whole thing is belly up. 3500 missing photos that I don't have, I mean that weren't missing as far as I know, showed up when I checked missing photos  in Classic, and I'm in process of reinstalling Classic and reimporting all photos from local backups. Obviously I made some mistake without noticing. But all is well. I have plenty of backups (Time Machine, daily local, Backblaze, and about 6 on SSDs dating from Jan 1 to present). So when I get done I'll be back where I started and ready to try again.

The 27002 below is real number of known photos, the 33, 962 is phantom number that turned up after I aborted the migration. They appear mostly as blank gray rectangles in the thumbnail view.

Unless you have a better idea, I figure to delete Lightroom and Classic, and start over from scratch.Import into Classic, then try to migrate to Lightroom.  See where that gets me. Plenty of time in these unfortunate corona days.

Thanks for the interest, and cheers--


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## fbx33 (Apr 29, 2020)

Further to above, if it's useful--


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## Johan Elzenga (Apr 29, 2020)

fbx33 said:


> Unless you have a better idea, I figure to delete Lightroom and Classic, and start over from scratch.Import into Classic, then try to migrate to Lightroom. See where that gets me. Plenty of time in these unfortunate corona days.


That would be a very bad idea. If you start from scratch, you lose all your edits. And if you start from scratch, there is no reason to first import into Lightroom Classic and then migrate. Importing directly into Lightroom would make more sense in that case.


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## fbx33 (Apr 30, 2020)

Thx, I may do that. For the present I have deleted Lightroom and reverted to Classic using a 3-day old CCC backup of the whole drive, copying over just the Pictures folder  Seems to work ok.  There are duplicates here, however. Easy enough to fix, I guess.


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## Victoria Bampton (Apr 30, 2020)

fbx33 said:


> Nope. Whole thing is belly up. 3500 missing photos that I don't have, I mean that weren't missing as far as I know, showed up when I checked missing photos  in Classic, and I'm in process of reinstalling Classic and reimporting all photos from local backups.


Stop!!! Reinstalling Classic is fine, but don't reimport. If Lightroom says those 3502 photos are missing, it still has all your edits but doesn't know where you put the photos. 

Clean up your catalog and then think about migration.


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## fbx33 (Apr 30, 2020)

Thanks. Whole problem moot now as I've eliminated Lightroom and reinstalled the whole "Pictures" folder from a four day old backup, before all this started. Going to settle down and try to forget about it all for a while.


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## johannes.raspe (May 1, 2020)

you should really consider reading Victorias book about LR cloudy. It contains a step by step guide how to tidy up your Classic library before migrating it. This should avoid problems like the one you obviously had.


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