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Lightroom Doesn't Remember Harddrive (Please Help!)

J

joejoejoe

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 13, 2006
1,428
110
I usually "add" photos to my lightroom library via an external hard drive.

the photos are linked and not imported into a new lightroom library.

today, I open lightroom (after the external has been unplugged), and it no longer recognized the external drive! catalogues and albums based on thousands and thousands and thousands of photos, nowhere to be found.

any idea why this is happening or what I can do???

I'm afraid of reimporting the photos as I fear this will make me lose all my edits, cataloguing, etc.

what do i do?!?
 
J

joejoejoe

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 13, 2006
1,428
110
Laird Knox said:
What happens when you plug the drive back in?
Click to expand...

It doesn't show up in lightroom as a "folder".

Instead it only shows up if I click "import" and have to re import everything from the drive.

I'm going nuts. This is about a year of work.
 
S

snberk103

macrumors 603
Oct 22, 2007
5,503
91
An Island in the Salish Sea
I wonder if you opened up Lightroom without the external HDD attached? Lightroom would have created a new (blank) catalogue - as if it were opening for the first time.

Easy enough to check. Open Lightroom - just let it do its thing. Make sure your external HDD is attached and recognized though… just make sure you see it in the Finder Sidebar.

Once Lightroom is open go to File in the top menu bar, and look for Open Recent. With any luck at all you will see another catalogue that is the one you are looking for. Open it and Bob's your Uncle. If you want to clean up a bit you should delete the new blank catalogue. Locate it with the Finder, and move it somewhere safe for a few days. You really really really don't want to accidentally delete a good, active, catalogue by accident… to be redundant.

===

Bit of Background: Lightroom stores the photos in one place, and in it's folder structure. As you probably know the folder structure is visible to Finder (unlike iPhoto). However, the catalogue is often stored somewhere else. It is the catalogue that records all the metadata, and the edits, and is very small compared to the photos. It is the catalogue that is the database. Hopefully you are backing up the catalogue as well? You can have Lightroom create a backup copy of the catalogue (mine is backed up once a day, if I open Lr that day) to a different location. In my case my primary catalogue is stored with the photos, and is backed up nightly when my photos get backed up. The backup copy of the catalogue is copied to a different HDD (for documents) and is backed up to a different backup HDD nightly when my documents are backed up, and by Time Machine.

===

Hope this helps….
 
F

fa8362

macrumors 68000
Jul 7, 2008
1,571
497
snberk103 said:
I wonder if you opened up Lightroom without the external HDD attached? Lightroom would have created a new (blank) catalogue - as if it were opening for the first time.
Click to expand...

This is what you did. Click "file," then "open catalog," and navigate to the correct catalog on your external.
 
J

joejoejoe

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 13, 2006
1,428
110
snberk103 said:
I wonder if you opened up Lightroom without the external HDD attached? Lightroom would have created a new (blank) catalogue - as if it were opening for the first time.

Easy enough to check. Open Lightroom - just let it do its thing. Make sure your external HDD is attached and recognized though… just make sure you see it in the Finder Sidebar.

Once Lightroom is open go to File in the top menu bar, and look for Open Recent. With any luck at all you will see another catalogue that is the one you are looking for. Open it and Bob's your Uncle. If you want to clean up a bit you should delete the new blank catalogue. Locate it with the Finder, and move it somewhere safe for a few days. You really really really don't want to accidentally delete a good, active, catalogue by accident… to be redundant.

===

Bit of Background: Lightroom stores the photos in one place, and in it's folder structure. As you probably know the folder structure is visible to Finder (unlike iPhoto). However, the catalogue is often stored somewhere else. It is the catalogue that records all the metadata, and the edits, and is very small compared to the photos. It is the catalogue that is the database. Hopefully you are backing up the catalogue as well? You can have Lightroom create a backup copy of the catalogue (mine is backed up once a day, if I open Lr that day) to a different location. In my case my primary catalogue is stored with the photos, and is backed up nightly when my photos get backed up. The backup copy of the catalogue is copied to a different HDD (for documents) and is backed up to a different backup HDD nightly when my documents are backed up, and by Time Machine.

===

Hope this helps….
Click to expand...

fa8362 said:
This is what you did. Click "file," then "open catalog," and navigate to the correct catalog on your external.
Click to expand...

thank you guys. I figured it was something like this but when my initial google search didn't turn anything up my anxiety level started to erupt.

i'll give this a shot when i'm back at my comp thank you in advance
 
MCAsan

MCAsan

macrumors 601
Jul 9, 2012
4,587
442
Atlanta
Of course, there is a Time Machine backup that includes the external LR drive....right???
 
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