Lightroom Classic Missing Photo...but just some?

[Jbear]

Ok, so first...full disclosure...I SUCK at post-processing. There you have it. I love being out and shooting, and even when there's nothing to shoot I love sitting out there with my gear and just being out there. I can get my stuff taken care of but it's a chore, and I just see it as a necessary "evil."
I have several ext. hard drives and I fired a few up that I haven't worked from in a bit, primarily to see if some of my newer features would "rescue" some older images that I liked but were too noisy or tonally messed up. I am better at post than I used to be, albeit I'm still not good at it. I know...get to it...
I opened some folders as normal and about half way though, images began appearing blurred out and listed as "not found." I understand how to find missing folders, but I'm not sure how it would come about that only certain images within a folder should appear to be missing. Some of them I had actually processed in the past, so I know they weren't deleted (not purposefully at least). If any of you has insight into this I would be most grateful. Thanks all!

 

[Anjin San]

You can try find lost images…click on the little dot and then navigate to its location since you know the filename. That's a one at a time thing though…although if there are multiple lost images in the same folder LR normally finds all of them after the first one. If you've been writing .xmp files all along…then reimporting all of the lost files through a Synchronize Folder operation should find the originals and your edits from the .xmp files…although if they're named the same you'll have to check the option to not ignore duplicates (or whatever the actual wording is). Then once imported you can verify the edits are there and delete the original lost original copies in the catalog…if it were me doing this I would move all of the 'lost' images in the catalog into a new collection, then add the newly imported ones to the same collection and delete the lost ones from the catalog…although again this might be a lengthy process depending on how many you're taking about. One thing about the Synchronize Folder option…you can always run it and there's an intermediate dialog that tells you how many files it found…you can see what that is and then exit out of the operation and compare to the number of lost files you have. Another option…you can rename the lost ones although TBH I don't know if LR will do that for lost originals…that would get around the issue of duplicate files.

If you're on Windows…the problem may be as simple as LR expects the originals to be on the F drive and this time you mounted the drive it became the H drive instead…this will result in LR marking them lost (at least I'm pretty sure it will). If that's the case…LR should show the lost files in the F drive in the left pane and all you need to do is change the now H drive to F…and it's been long enough since I was a Windows sysadmin that I don't recollect exactly how to do that…us macOS people don't use no steenking drive letters ya know.

If none of this helps or maybe doesn't make sense…then perhaps a better description of the problem will let us advise.

 

[Jbear]

I appreciate the thorough response! I can't see it being a drive name issue just because other images in the same folder from the same import are fine. Like I said though...I am quite a luddite when it comes to anything beyond importing>processing>and moving on. I need to change that, but between my job (bio teacher), coaching, and playing hockey, and actually being outside shooting...there isn't a lot of time left over master this. Excuses...gotta love 'em.

 

[NorthernFocus]

Did you look for the files with a file manager app? You mention multiple hard drives. Are you sure all of the images are on each one? Do you use multiple LR catalogs or a single master catalog?