Problems Restoring Lightroom Catalog

Dem55

Dem55

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Name
Lorraine
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So, the hard drive on my laptop failed a couple of weeks ago. It's now got a new hard drive installed, but I'm struggling with restoring LR to where it was pre-crash.

All of my photos are backed up to a external drives (2 - A and B). The LR backup is on one of these drives (say drive B), but not all of the images are on there . I've reloaded LR onto my laptop and tried to import all the photos which were on there at the point when the laptop crashed, but although I can see all of the RAW files, some of the images which were edited are showing as grey boxes on LR. I'm pretty sure that the reason is that the edited files are sitting on the other external hard drive (A), when I look at a list of the files, there are .xmp's in there as well as the RAW files, so these must be the edits - yes?. So far, so good - but LR won't let me import the images from drive A into the catalog. They show up as grey boxes (not totally greyed out - the image is visible), and I can't get LR to import them. I've tried check all/uncheck all, but it doesn't work.

I know I could probably copy the files across from hard drive A to B, but I'd rather not as they eat up the memory. Or should the .xmp files always sit on the same hard drive as the LR catalog?

There's probably an obvious answer to this, but I can't seem to get it to work - can anyone help please?
 
you shouldn't need to reimport anything.

just put the catalog back in the same path as it was, make sure the external drives are on the same drive letters and paths then open the catalog.

everything should be as it was before reinstall.
 
Hi Neil,

Thanks for replying. The external drives are definitely on the same path as before the crash. Weird - I've just opened LR again to try to work out if it's on a different drive and there they are.....
At least it's all solved now :)

Thanks again for the reply
 
Look in folder view.
Select any folder with missing images
Right click an image and select view in expolrer (finder on a mac)
If missing it wiull ask you to point to the file, Find it and select it and click ok.
All the images in that folder will be found.

You can do this with each folder individually if you like and if a whole folder is missing right click the folder in the left panel and then select find folder.... Do the same with the foilder instead of the file. All images inside thje folder that were in the catalogue will sync
 
Thanks Jim, I'll remember that. For some reason I struggle with the way the LR catalog works - even after watching a couple of tutorials. I haven't actually imported too many photos yet, I thought it might be better to get the hang of it first.
 
You can also search for all your missing files and then fix them that way.

When moving files if you do it within lightroom it will know where everything is, rather than using explorer and having to tell Lr where you moved them ;)
 
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