New Hard Drive and having some challenges getting LR to use it

[jjlad]

Hi there,
I picked up a 3tb usb drive and moved my photos from the usb drive I was using before..to the new one, but I didn't use LR to do it.
Now when I go to those years in the catalogue, the lisings are greyed out and have the question mark so I select 'Find missing ..." and navigate to the new drive and click 'select folder'. The problem is LR then tells me the photos already exist in the catalogue and it asks me if I want to merge them. I'm not sure how I should answer that.
Advice appreciated as always.
Thanks,
jj

 

[DaveS]

Hi JJ,

Your profile indicates you are on Windows 7. So two questions... Firstly, is the folder structure the same on the new usb drive as before, including the folder name of the root folder? And secondly, is the drive letter the same as before? If you make both of those the same as they were before, Lightroom should see them and think that the pictures haven't moved.

 

[Victoria Bampton]

And if Dave's questions don't answer it, a screenshot or two of the Folders panel would help.

 

[jjlad]

And if Dave's questions don't answer it, a screenshot or two of the Folders panel would help.

Hi and Merry Christmas! Not expecting an answer over the next few days of course, but thought I should get back to you.
I think the problem was that I didn't have the old usb drive hooked in when I was doing that. I tried a few different workarounds and it was very late at night so not sure what eventually worked. I did end up getting LR to recognize them. I hadn't rebooted for a few days and after rebooting it worked.

Then ..just to keep you busy I created a new challenge. I replaced my 250gig C drive with a new 1TB C drive. I did that by putting the new drive into an enclosure and ghosting my C drive to it. Then I installed the new drive and it worked right off. Now, having that much space I decided it would be better to have all my photos on it and only my backup on the 3TB USB drive, so using LR I transferred all the folders over to My Pictures on C.

Now the trouble I have is that LR doesn't seem to want to show all the photos within some of the folders. Not a lot of photos ..just a few. They were moved by LR and show up in Windows Explorer, and when I open the Import dialogue they show up there, greyed out and not available to import but yet they aren't visible in catalogue.

The catalogue at that point is completely unfiltered so not sure what is keeping them from showing up.

There are some PDF's that don't show up but those are my model releases etc. which I file with the photos and I guess since they aren't photos, LR won't catalogue them ..so that's ok.

The other photos that don't show are a puzzle though. At least I know they are present on the drive and accessible with CS5 when I need them so I can live with that but would still like to get them to show up if I ever can.

Anyway ..hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas and that continues for the New Year.
jj

 

[Victoria Bampton]

When you say they're not visible in the catalog, do you mean they listed as thumbnails but the thumbnails are grey? Any question marks around?

 

[jjlad]

Hi there,
Tied up for a few days. No actually, in the catalogue they weren't even coming up as greyed out thumbnails. Just not showing up at all, yet in the import dialogue they were showing up up as unchecked thumbnails..like they'd already been imported.
I did catalogue searches for their numbers and they wouldn't come up there either.
I finally had to rename them in explorer then import them and that worked so I do have them but they came in without the work I'd previously done on them.
Water under the bridge now ...won't worry about it because they are there and I can rework them.

I do have another puzzle now though which I'll post seperately, relating to memory useage.

Thanks
jj