# Re-importing photos and exclamation marks



## inmyprime (Aug 23, 2016)

Hi, I am trying to clean up and merge all my 7 catalogues/libraries and import some photos from iphoto as well in process, so that all my photos are in one place and in one catalogue. In any case, it seems that not all the photos that are inside my LR library folders also show up in my catalogue. The previews in My Collections show many photos with an exclamation mark/missing link. While I can locate the master photos in the folders themselves from outside of LR, I can't quite figure out how to re-establish links to all the missing previews (this catalogue has about 100k photos) without going through every single photo manually....
There may also be many photos that are neither in My Collections nor in the LR catalogue but still residing in the folders themselves. Is there an easy way of re-importing everything without duplicating and creating more exclamation marks and messing up My Collections? (there are many ratings, not to mention processing itself etc that I really need to keep!)

Today I tried reimporting all the master files, Import -> Move -> and checking "Don't import Suspected Duplicates" and it seems that not all photos were imported into the catalogue (as there are still exclamation marks on some of my folders in My Collections). Perhaps LR discarded all the files with a similar/same file names, I am not really certain why it hasn't imported everything.
Is the right way to do it to uncheck "Don't import Suspected Duplicates"? I worry messing up the catalogue and losing My Collections structure as well as the edits (which I somehow did manage to mess up, previously. I then had to get a copy of the Catalogue file from a backup disk but some of the master files are not linked up properly with the collections folder/previews). Sorry, I hope I managed to explain my problem more or less clearly...it is late and I have been at my catalogues for about a week now...This is 16 years worth of photographs and I am paranoid to mess things up. 

I suppose what I am unclear about is:
- If I delete the folders from LR with photos in them, will this delete the master files or just remove them from the LR catalogue?
- and if I delete all the folders from LR, will this automatically delete all my edits and collections and basically wipe the catalogue file clean? I can't really work out how to re-import stuff without duplication and get rid of the exclamation marks...


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 23, 2016)

First point: an exclamation mark simply means that Lightroom has lost track of the original image. Because the image is still in the Lightroom database, you can't solve this by reimporting it.

Deleting folders or individual images from Lightroom does not delete the images from the disk, but you do lose all your edits so that's not a good idea. If you 'reconnect' an image by clicking on the exclamation mark and then locate the image in the dialog that follows, you can check an option to also reconnect 'nearby images'. That can be a life saver. Any missing image that is still in the correct hierarchy will automatically be reconnected too, so in theory you could reconnect all misskng images by just reconnecting one. In practice it probably will take a bit more work, but it might still go faster than you think.

Also check for entire missing folders (these have a question mark and are dimmed). You can reconnect these in the same manner, by right-clicking on the folder and choosing 'Find Missing Folder'. If you do that with a missing top folder, the entire hierarchy will be reconnected in one click.


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## inmyprime (Aug 23, 2016)

Ah thanks for the tips. I think my using "Move" when importing, it dislocated many files from the original folders thats why the links have been broken from the Collections folders. I will try your suggestions reconnecting nearby images once import is finished and see what happens.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 24, 2016)

inmyprime said:


> Ah thanks for the tips. I think my using "Move" when importing, it dislocated many files from the original folders thats why the links have been broken from the Collections folders. I will try your suggestions reconnecting nearby images once import is finished and see what happens.



No, using 'Move' on import shouldn't cause any problems like that. This moves (rather than copies) *new* images to a different folder on import. Lightroom will then write the path to that new location in its database, so you can neither lose track of existing images this way, nor lose track of the new imports.


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## inmyprime (Aug 24, 2016)

Ok so here's the situation that I have after the re-import of the images:

I have an image file, for example DSC_9692 which has an exclamation mark. When I locate and try to re-link it to the correct file (which is now called DSC_9692-2-2 in the hard drive), LR is first telling me that the file I seleced has a different name than the one I was trying to locate

telling me that it is already associating this image with another link. In the catalogue, I can see that both of these files are showing me a preview yet one of them has an exclamation mark (and that's the file that has all the edits applied to it). Is there a way to fix this? (This same problem applies to thousands of images).

To remedy it, I need to understand how this happened.
When you check the "Don't import Suspected Duplicates" box, does it simply go by file names to determine what's a duplicate and what isn't? I guess sometimes the file sequence within the camera reverts to the beginning and some of the files down the line will end up having the same file names. Will those be excluded from being imported into LR altogether if the "Don't import Suspected Duplicates" box is checked or will they get a new name, such as <filename>-2 regardless?


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## inmyprime (Aug 24, 2016)

Few questions:
1. How does LR handle different files with the same name?
2. Does it have a function to search for duplicates and delete them?
3. Is there a way to show only the previews with exclamation marks?
4. How can I find out whether all of the photos from the master library has been imported?

Perhaps I should have used the add option on import, not move, and then move the files inside LR. I thought LR would just take the files from folders inside library and move them into chronological folders, keeping the links to the correct previews/collections. Instead, it looks like it renamed a bunch of them from eg DSC100 to DSC100-2 and so on.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 24, 2016)

This is an indication that you've imported the same image at least twice. Lightroom adds '-2' to the name if it needs to move or copy an image to a folder that already has an image with that name. Another possibility is that the camera counter was reset, and that you just happened to import the new images into the same folder as old images with the same name.

If you import images and check the option not to import duplicates, Lightroom will not only look at the file name but at the capture date and probably other metadata too. People at Adobe also know that cameras start numbering at 1 again after some time...

Yes, there is a menu to search for missing images. I'm typing this on my iPad right now, but I believe it's 'Library - Find Missing Photos' or something like that.

There is a plugin that can find duplicate images. Here's one, there may be more: Lightroom Plugins - Duplicate Finder for Lightroom

To find out whether all photos have been imported, right click on the top folder and choose 'Synchronize Folder'. Lightroom should come up with an import dialog that suggests to import all photos that have not yet been imported. I would not use this right now however, because it may lead to more duplicate images if Lightroom is confused because you renamed images. Sort out that mess first! Also be careful not to delete missing images, because that is what Synchronize Folder also does by default (uncheck that option).


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## inmyprime (Aug 24, 2016)

Yes it looks as though there are some duplicates in the catalogue even though I always checked the "don't move suspected duplicates" box. I guess it's not a reliable option. Can LR handle files with the same name but in different folders? (For files that aren't duplicates but with the same file name, residing indifferent folders).

I tried using a 3rd party software to batch rename files with -2 names and when I try to relink, it does synchronise the whole folder. Previously, it only did this for single files (since the file names differed from what the catalogue thought it was linking to...).

I need to find a way to filter out imported duplicates (without deleting the original files) otherwise I am tempted to go to the back up hard drive and start again where I left off before this mess happened.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 24, 2016)

Yes, Lightroom can handle files with the same name if they are in different folders. It's not wise to do this in my opinion, because you can easily get confused if you ever have to 'reconnect' them (as you noticed). I would advise to always rename on import (just adding the capture date is enough). But technically there should not be a problem.

Try that plugin. It uses EXIF data rather than file names, so it should be able to show you duplicates even if they do have different names. Another thing you can do is select the 'All Photographs' view, and then sort on capture date. That will show the duplicates side by side, regardless of their file names.


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## inmyprime (Aug 24, 2016)

I am using an app called Name Changer to batch-remove just the last two characters "-2" from the file name, where there is a duplicate. If I then relink the preview file to the master file with the changed name, it does update the whole folder which speed things up (it doesn't do the whole folder of the names are not matching 100% which adds an extra step) so perhaps some hope is on the horizon...

There are hundreds of folders (not all of them messed up) so it will take some time.

I have a programme that hunts for duplicate files (macpaw gemini I think) but presumably I will need something from within LR to avoid the dreaded exclamation marks again (as the plugin suggested).

About the "synchronise folder" function: there are folders that have more photos in them that are being seen by LR for some reason. I presume running his function will help. Can I be sure that when I synchronise the folders, it's not going to mess up all the edits I made to the photos already inside the Catalogue?

Have to be really careful with the catalogue file :(


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 24, 2016)

Don't try to do everything at once. First get rid of the duplicates and make sure that all the missing images are found and reconnected. Then, when the catalog is fine and there are no more missing images, you can see if Synchronize Folder brings up any images that are not in the catalog at all. Check them carefully before importing them, because they could still be duplicates rather than new images.


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## inmyprime (Aug 25, 2016)

The strange thing is that there aren't actually many (possibly any) actual duplicates in the master library. 
For example the preview file links to DSC100 which doesn't seem to exist inside the master library (at least it is not the correct file when I search manually) yet DSC100-2 IS the file   that needs to be linked to the DSC100 (and the reason why I need to first rename all the files ending with -2 so that the previews synchronise for the whole folder and not for every single file.
I think perhaps re-importing the master library may have caused it (using the "move" function on import which removed the master files from some of their original folders and un-linked the connection with the previews/edits and giving the files file names ending in -2). 

I will be sure to rename all files to unique names at the end, to be sure that there are no duplicate file names inside the master library. And also use "synchronise folders" in future rather than import. Don't know what I was thinking.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 25, 2016)

Why would you want to use 'Synchronize Folder' rather than Import? That doesn't make sense, because it means you'd have to manually copy new images into these folders first. Use the functions in Lightroom the way they were intended, that is always the best approach. Perhaps buy a book about Lightroom, so you get a better understanding of the basis principles. Use import to import images, but don't use it (and neither use Syncnhronize Folder) if you even have 'missing' images again.

Obviously I don't know what you've been doing, but moving images around and not renaming them can certainly cause these '-2' names to appear. If you use Lightroom to move the images, they still should not get disconnected, however. Disconnected ('missing') images are almost always caused by people moving images around or renaming them in the Finder.


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## inmyprime (Aug 25, 2016)

I had some images from iPhoto that I imported into LR and some images were inside the folder structures that were used by LR but not all were visible by the catalogue it seems. I wanted LR to import all new images and arrange them into folders by date (previously, some folders were arranged by place, manually, rather than date). 
So by reimporting new as well as old images, LR has moved some existing images out of its original folders and also renamed some of the files in the process, disconnecting them from the previews.
At least that's what I think what happened, I'm still not 100% certain. Things were complicated by the fact that I ran the duplicate file finder software from within finder (not LR).
Renaming the files and reconnecting them folder by folder seems to be doing the trick.
Just not sure how to be sure that no master files get deleted in the process. I have been using LR for 5-6 years but never studied the catalogueing part of it (it was always straight forward to imort from card and then develop the photos). This issue only came up by me trying to create one catalogue for ALL of my photos (which used to be in many different places and I got fed up). Thanks for the help.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 25, 2016)

You really should get yourself a book about Lightroom and try to understand the library module. Any folder that is catalogued by Lightroom is also visible in the Lightroom folder panel. No exceptions. And secondly, Lightroom does not 'disconnect itself' from images. That simply does not happen, period. The only one who can do that is you.


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## inmyprime (Aug 26, 2016)

All I can say is that weird things happen if you try to re-import your exististing library (granted, it's a dumb thing to do). I have just experimented with a dummy catalogue and it doesn't quite behave as I would expect it to especially with identical file names.
For a start, I most certainly haven't added "-2" to thousands of file name endings, either in finder or in LR nor through any other application. Some files even have -2-2 at the end. I would expect LR not to touch already imported images (especially when the duplicates box is checked) let alone rename anything.
This catalogue has been through many different versions of LR as well.
With respect, how can one say with certainty that previous versions of LR could not have had any gremlins when it came to import.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 26, 2016)

The '-2' in file names will occur in at least three situations. And because there is no choice, Lightroom will not stop and ask you for permission:

1: you try to import an image and copy/move it into a folder that already contains an image with the same name. The OS does not allow two files with the same name in the same folder, so all Lightroom can do is use a different name for the new image. So it adds '-02'. What else would you want it do do? Delete the other image?

2: you send an image from Lightroom to Photoshop specifying 'use a copy with Lightroom adjustments'. If the original is a TIFF and you save the new copy as TIFF as well (without adding something like '-edit'), Lightroom has no choice but to add '-2' to the name. If you later open this copy again in Photoshop with again the option 'use a copy with Lightroom adjustments', Lightroom will once again have to add '-2' to the name of this new copy. So this second copy will have '-2-2' at the end of its name. So this depends on the settings in your External Editor preferences.

3: you rename a series of images in Lightroom, but he new name of one image would be the same as the name of an existing image. For example: say you have a series of images with names from 'IMG-001' to 'IMG-100'. You tell Lightroom to rename them, starting with 'IMG-100' as the first new name (so IMG-001 becomes IMG-100, IMG-002 becomes IMG-101, etc.). When Lightroom tries to do this, it encounters the following problem: it wants to rename IMG-001 to IMG-100, but IMG-100 already exists (because that file is not yet renamed). So what it will do is use IMG-100-2 instead. Later on in the process, the original file IMG-100 gets renamed (to IMG-199), so in the end you do have a file called IMG-100-2, but you don't have IMG-100 anymore. That seems odd at first, but this is the logical explanation.



inmyprime said:


> With respect, how can one say with certainty that previous versions of LR could not have had any gremlins when it came to import



I'm not saying there could not have been any gremlins at all, I'm saying they don't contain a bug that makes Lightroom 'disconnect itself from images' or adds '-02' to a name for no reason at all. How can I be certain? Because you are not the only one who has used that version of Lightroom. If a glitch like that existed, somebody else (lots of 'somebody elses') would have found it too. We would definitely know about it. The chance that you are the first person who found such an obvious bug in a long existing version of Lightroom is zero.


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## inmyprime (Aug 26, 2016)

"The '-2' in file names will occur in at least three situations. And because there is no choice, Lightroom will not stop and ask you for permission:

1: you try to import an image and copy/move it into a folder that already contains an image with the same name. The OS does not allow two files with the same name in the same folder, so all Lightroom can do is use a different name for the new image. So it adds '-02'. What else would you want it do do? Delete the other image?"

I would normally expect either LR or finder to tell me that folder x already contains a file with that name, do I want to keep both or replace etc....I would not expect LR to go ahead and rename thousands of files.

I have just carefully looked through my back up drive which contains the catalogue/library in the state bedore this mishap happened: it's perfectly in order so something happened during the recent import.

This is what I did:
1. I removed the master folders from iPhoto libraries (which possibly contained a number of different files with the same file names as in the LR catalogue).
2. I imported the photos into LR.
3. I reimported all the LR master files using move function (and checking the box "don't import duplicates"). The reason I did this was because I wanted LR to move all the photos inside folders in chronological order while maintaining connection to them in previews.

The outcome was that mess (it did move the files into other folders, in chronological order, but the previews still pointed towards the other folders, which were then empty. Moreover, many files ended up with -2 or -2-2 names.

I most certainly haven't messed with either folders or files outside of LR catalogue (in the finder) independently.
When I ran the duplicate finder software, it was only done to files that weren't in the LR master library.

I can't put a chance on this happening only to me but perhaps I  should have waited till all the thumbnails have loaded from the hard drive before importing? (I usually go ahead with the import and don't wait, also when importing from cards. Perhaps this is a mistake.

I will try this again with my back up drive (after backing it up of course) to see if the same happens.
Perhaps I should let LR rename all the files first to make sure there won't be duplicate file names that might clash with files from iPhoto libraries.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 26, 2016)

inmyprime said:


> I would normally expect either LR or finder to tell me that folder x already contains a file with that name, do I want to keep both or replace etc....I would not expect LR to go ahead and rename thousands of files.



It doesn't rename thousands of files, only the *new file* you are importing. Because this is a new file, it doesn't make sense that Lightroom would ask you to do anything other than keep both. Remember that only the _*names*_ happen to be the same. It's very unlikely that the _*images*_ are the same (unless you try to import images that are already imported). This is unlike 'Save as' in Photoshop, where you could indeed want to overwrite the old version of a file with an updated version. That's not how Lightroom works (and why I suggest to learn how it works). Maybe you'd like it to be different, but this is the way it is.



inmyprime said:


> 3. I reimported all the LR master files using move function (and checking the box "don't import duplicates"). The reason I did this was because I wanted LR to move all the photos inside folders in chronological order while maintaining connection to them in previews.



And that you should not have done. Think about it logically: Re-importing files with 'don't import duplicates' checked should lead to *nothing* being imported (_because every file is already imported_). So if something _does get imported_ it will almost by definition be unwanted. It will be because the duplicate checking failed somehow, leading to duplicates in Lightroom.



inmyprime said:


> I will try this again with my back up drive (after backing it up of course) to see if the same happens. Perhaps I should let LR rename all the files first to make sure there won't be duplicate file names that might clash with files from iPhoto libraries.



That sounds like a good idea, *but don't re-import anything*. Only import those images from iPhoto that weren't imported yet. If you want to move existing images in Lightroom, do so by drag and drop in Lightroom.


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## inmyprime (Aug 27, 2016)

Here is an interesting thing that just happened in one of my LR CC catalogues:
I was in the process of renaming around 22k of photos in LR when the programme crashed (no other programmes were running in case you ask).
When I opened it again, I checked for missing photos and it showed me that whole folders of photos went missing. 
It's a clear example that LR 'disconnected' hundreds of files from the previews. I had to manually rename hundreds of files from within finder to get LR to re-establish connection to the missing previews. I ran missing photos just prior to this and all were inside the catalogue.
It is VITAL to continuously run diagnostic steps (such as checking for missing photos and synchronise folders to see whether the structure is in place and all the photos recognised by LR. Perhaps there are other diagnostic tools I am not aware of? Missing photos and folder synchronisation are just two I am currently aware of.


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## inmyprime (Aug 27, 2016)

I am beginning to think that perhaps it might be safer after all to run several catalogues if LR instead of one large one of errors like this happen and I don't notice them. It will be easier to repair a library with 40k of photos than 800k. Thoughts welcome.


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 27, 2016)

Can you give the exact steps you take when renaming photos? I still get the feeling you may be doing something wrong. If Lightroom crashes in the middle of a renaming process, it's understandable that certain images may go 'missing' if the catalog file had not been updated yet when the crash occurred. However, 'missing folders' (if that's what you mean with 'whole folders of photos went missing') is not one of the things you'd expect to happen, because Lightroom wasn't doing anything with the location of folders. If you just meant that lots of images went missing, but not any folders, then unfortunately that is indeed what could happen in a crash like that.

One other remark: I would never run a rename command on as many as 22k photos all at once. There is no such thing as flawless software. It's always possible that something unexpected happens, so don't push the envelope by asking your software to do huge tasks like this. Check your catalog first (run an integrity check as well), make a backup of the catalog, and then rename photos in batches of reasonable size (I wouldn't take more than up to 1000 at once). You could even consider making a backup of the catalog again from time to time, so that in case of problems you don't have to start all over again.


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## inmyprime (Aug 27, 2016)

Yes, it's the photos that got disconnected by LR which were in many different folders. The folders themselves didn't change locations. I was running the rename function from within LR. It seems that preview links don't update at the same time as the the renaming process takes place which results in quite a bit of a mess of a crash happens. And I am writing this specifically to reply to your point re:
"LR does not disconnect itself from images. This simply does not not happen. Period"
This simply is not correct and I'm concerned that there is a perception that LR can do no wrong.. I am reporting my mishaps in hope that it can be instructive to others. I also realise my descriptions of the problems may not be very clear.
Anything can happen during an import or renaming process, aside from a crash. The drive can get disconnected too. I am just observing that (for my taste) there aren't enough safeguards in place in LR as the consequences can be catastrophic and compound themselves quickly if no immediate action is taken (I only noticed that previews were disconnected from master files after running "find missing photos" function. LR ought to at least inform one that some photos may have been disconnected, if it's not able to safeguard against it).

I understand your point about renaming in smaller batch sizes and of course this is what I will be doing from now on. However LR specifically removed limits on sizes when it comes to managing catalogue sizes but I'm not yet certain whether I can take the jump and manage everything from within one catalogue.

Btw are more advanced features available In LR for file renaming? (Such as batch-removing characters from file names.)


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 27, 2016)

I you try to catch me on words, this discussion is over and I will not waste any more time trying to help you solve your problems. When I wrote "_LR does not disconnect itself from images. This simply does not not happen. Period_" we were *not* discussing a situation where a crash happens right in the middle of a batch rename process, but a situation where you used wrong methods like re-importing and synchronizing folders to reconnect images (see also the title of this thread...). You never mentioned having crashes, you talked about situations where -in your view- Lightroom would disconnect itself from images on purpose, or because there was a bug. That's why I pointed out that Lightroom doesn't do that on purpose and that other people would already have found a bug like that if it existed. If you had said that you experienced missing images after crashes while running a batch rename process, the discussion would have been completely different. BTW, I certainly do not have the perception that Lightroom can't do anything wrong (I can give you quite a list of things it does wrong in my opinion), but in my experience it is much more often the Lightroom user who does things wrong and then doesn't understand why he did something wrong. Most Lightroom problems or limitations are also well-known, so if people run into them we can explain what happened and how to solve it.

Like so many other software, Lightroom sometimes has to cache things before it can update the catalog. If you run a process that requires updating information on thousands of images, it's understandable that Lightroom can't do this without caching. If it didn't use caching, it would not only become terribly slow, it would also need to write the catalog (or part of it) to disk thousands of times. A crash during that process can indeed become a big problem if the cached data cannot be restored, and I agree that a little more information on what may have happened or a general warning after you restart it would be welcome. I'm not an Adobe developer however, so don't tell me, tell Adobe.

Unfortunately, there aren't more advanced features in Lightroom for file renaming. It's mostly all or nothing, there is no search-and-replace kind of renaming. There are plugins that can do that, but of course using a plugin may also increase the chance that something goes wrong because you add one more step to the equation. So use such a plugin with care, on smaller batches, and make regular backups.


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## inmyprime (Aug 27, 2016)

In case it matters, I found the tone somewhat aggressive and accusatory to begin with. But I realise this is also a shortcoming of this communication medium. I don't mean to catch you out.
Just to back up a little: I learnt my lessons with iPhoto not to mess with files inside the finders independently. I honestly can't say what wrecked havoc in the catalogue the first time around, but whatever it was, I was shocked that it's possible to achieve such levels of messiness, and so quickly, from within LR, bug or no bug.
(Re-importing existing images, using "move" function and checking the "don't move duplicates" box should have left most images that were already in LR where they were. Something else must have happened.)
In any case, I probably won't get to the bottom of it since I can't seem to replicate the exact same behaviour with a dummy catalogue. I'm just observing the catalogue after every major step to see if anything atypical happens.


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## inmyprime (Aug 23, 2016)

Hi, I am trying to clean up and merge all my 7 catalogues/libraries and import some photos from iphoto as well in process, so that all my photos are in one place and in one catalogue. In any case, it seems that not all the photos that are inside my LR library folders also show up in my catalogue. The previews in My Collections show many photos with an exclamation mark/missing link. While I can locate the master photos in the folders themselves from outside of LR, I can't quite figure out how to re-establish links to all the missing previews (this catalogue has about 100k photos) without going through every single photo manually....
There may also be many photos that are neither in My Collections nor in the LR catalogue but still residing in the folders themselves. Is there an easy way of re-importing everything without duplicating and creating more exclamation marks and messing up My Collections? (there are many ratings, not to mention processing itself etc that I really need to keep!)

Today I tried reimporting all the master files, Import -> Move -> and checking "Don't import Suspected Duplicates" and it seems that not all photos were imported into the catalogue (as there are still exclamation marks on some of my folders in My Collections). Perhaps LR discarded all the files with a similar/same file names, I am not really certain why it hasn't imported everything.
Is the right way to do it to uncheck "Don't import Suspected Duplicates"? I worry messing up the catalogue and losing My Collections structure as well as the edits (which I somehow did manage to mess up, previously. I then had to get a copy of the Catalogue file from a backup disk but some of the master files are not linked up properly with the collections folder/previews). Sorry, I hope I managed to explain my problem more or less clearly...it is late and I have been at my catalogues for about a week now...This is 16 years worth of photographs and I am paranoid to mess things up. 

I suppose what I am unclear about is:
- If I delete the folders from LR with photos in them, will this delete the master files or just remove them from the LR catalogue?
- and if I delete all the folders from LR, will this automatically delete all my edits and collections and basically wipe the catalogue file clean? I can't really work out how to re-import stuff without duplication and get rid of the exclamation marks...


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## Johan Elzenga (Aug 27, 2016)

OK, no hard feelings. The perceived tone of a written message can indeed be different for the reader compared to how it was meant by the writer, and I realize I have a rather 'direct' style of writing. The problem is always that you can't really retrace your steps exactly, so you tell it the way you think it happened. The other party (me, in this case) knows that certain things simply can't have happened like that, but it doesn't mean they know exactly what did happen either. So we're both guessing based on what we know, and even more on what we don't know.


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## info_25 (Jan 25, 2020)

Johan Elzenga said:


> First point: an exclamation mark simply means that Lightroom has lost track of the original image. Because the image is still in the Lightroom database, you can't solve this by reimporting it.
> 
> Deleting folders or individual images from Lightroom does not delete the images from the disk, but you do lose all your edits so that's not a good idea. If you 'reconnect' an image by clicking on the exclamation mark and then locate the image in the dialog that follows, you can check an option to also reconnect 'nearby images'. That can be a life saver. Any missing image that is still in the correct hierarchy will automatically be reconnected too, so in theory you could reconnect all misskng images by just reconnecting one. In practice it probably will take a bit more work, but it might still go faster than you think.
> 
> Also check for entire missing folders (these have a question mark and are dimmed). You can reconnect these in the same manner, by right-clicking on the folder and choosing 'Find Missing Folder'. If you do that with a missing top folder, the entire hierarchy will be reconnected in one click.


 
I have the problem too and thought this was a solution until I went to where the image is supposed to be located Lightroom Catalog.lrcat and it is greyed out and won't let me select it.  I have a new computer and in trying to use Lightroom every image in the catalog has an exclamation point. How do I find my images?


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## Rob_Cullen (Jan 25, 2020)

How do I find my images?
1) YOU have to know where your image files are stored on your computer drives- Use Finder/File-Explorer to find the image files by a search.
2) The Folders shown in the Lr-Classic Folder panel must match exactly the location where YOU store your photos.  If they do not match- they will show as 'Missing'  ? marks and ! marks on the photos.

Read this full article in the link to make the Catalog database (Folders) re-link to the Folders where YOU know they exist.
MISSING FILES & FOLDERS


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## info_25 (Jan 25, 2020)

Thank you for your reply. I appreciate it. I wish I knew where my images were stored. I have always imported them through a program. iPhotos, then Aperture, now Lightroom. They go wherever those programs put them. I have no idea where that is. In finder I see a few random folders (Italy trip), some year folders 2015 - 2018, a bunch (maybe 200?)  single images, and some Lightroom folders: One called Lightroom, which contains backups (last one 10-27-19 right before my old computer crashed), Lightroom Catalog Previews.Irda, Lightroom Catalog.lrcat (not greyed out in Finder) and Lightroom folders, with has only 5 of my hundreds of actual folders in Lightroom itself. 

 One LightroomMasters with the years 1998-2016, and in each of those 12 more folders, which I assume are months?.  None of this makes sense to me. Does it to you? It's all so random.  Perhaps each software I used put the photos in different places? 

I am not a techie person.  Something I searched yesterday told me to click the exclamation point on one of my photos and click yes when asked if I wanted to find it. I was then to find my lrcat file and click that, but the lrcat file is greyed out. 

I also have an external backup of ALL my photos, even the bad ones, yikes. Is there a way to use that?  I imagine I would lose all my LR edits.  I'd really rather just have my old LR photos back like they were on my old computer.


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## LRList001 (Jan 27, 2020)

Eventually, yes you can get all your photos back as they were on your old computer, if you have got both full backups of the photos and you have the LR catalogue.  Sounds like you do at least have the catalogue.  As you are using the word 'iPhoto', I am probably not best placed to help you as that was an Apple Macintosh product, and I use Microsoft's Windows.  However, the basics are very similar.

How did you get your photos (not the catalogue) from the old computer to the new one? 
Do you know that has been done at all?
If it has been done, how many disk drives do you have fitted to your computer, what are they called?
Do you keep your photos on an external hard drive (EHD)?
Somehow, you have to find where the photos are.  Hence, use the Finder to locate the file name of a photo you know you have somewhere on your computer.  LR will tell you file name.  Click on one of the exclamation marks ("!" character) and LR will tell you where that photo used to be as well as its name.  The name is what you must search for using the Finder.  Somebody else will have to give you detailed instructions on how to use the Finder and how disks are labelled on an Apple Mac computer.

I-see-light has given you a link to a page of information telling you how to find your photos.  Until you have worked through the steps in that and tell us what results you get at each stage, it really isn't going to be possible to help you further.


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