Desperately Seeking Lightroom Help

[davemitchellimages]

Hi folks,

I am having some possibly terminal problems with my Lightroom catalogue. Long story short, I have spent weeks on forums etc ( Adobe ) and I think that my lack of knowledge has led me down a rabbit hole [trying to] get it resurrected.
I am wondering if anyone knows [how] to get this nightmare sorted out.

In short, during an attempt to move to a new external drive, I have somehow lost all of my previous edits now that I am on the new drive. I removed the old one and reimported from the new one, apparently this was ( according to Adobe support members ), a major mistake.

I currently have two external drives with my collection of photos in them but after moving to the new drive in Lightroom, I have no access to previous edits. All the collection are as when I removed the original hard drive. I have catalogue backups in various places but none seem to bring back the edits when I open from them to the new drive. I suspect that I may have lost them altogether.

So, as you can see, I have accepted that it is beyond me and need ... help.
Any suggestions are welcome.

Many thanks,

Dave

[ameerat42]

Hi Dave. A couple of questions:
1) What is your operating system, Win [x], or Mac [something]?
2) Are you using Lightroom Classic, or the subscription service?

I am not a LR user, but people will want to know.

As a preliminary, I have found that the LR Classic catalog locations are:

Windows: \Users\[user name]\Pictures\Lightroom
macOS: /Users/[user name]/Pictures/Lightroom

[ricktas]

OK

Lightroom by default leaves your original images where they are and adds a 'sidecar' file holding all the edit instructions for each image.

As I understand it, you got a new hard drive. Did you transfer your images from your old drive(s) to the new one, or are all the images still on the old drives and not on the new one.

When you edited in lightroom in the past you would have been prompted to save your catalog. Where did you set this catalog up to save, on the old hard drives?

You say you have backups of the old catalolgs. These will be looking for your photos on the old drives. So even if you plugged an old drive in now, it would likely get a different drive ID. eg it might have been D drive in the past, but now it is E drive. Your old catalogs are looking in the wrong place.

Is my understanding correct, of what you are experiencing.

[Boo53]

You mention you have catalogue backups, but they would be generated almost weekly, how far back have you gone.

And do you have regular real backups (one disk to another), where there'd be another copy of your most recent catalogue.

And just on the off chance a catalogue file has wandered off to somewhere else a search of the whole drive for *.lrcat might just help

[ameerat42]

Dave. I wonder if you ever solved your problem?

I guess you are using LR Classic? However, have a look at the link below to see how
you're supposed to move your LR-edited photos to a new drive. In particular now that
you've done it (but have lost edits), look at the second method described there. It says
that you have to re-link your moved photos to LR.

https://improvephotography.com/49790/how-to-move-your-lightroom-photos-to-an-external-drive/

[Journeyman]

I believe that using lightroom requires a roast chicken offered to the Supreme Commander of image processing. For a few reasons I don’t want to store images in the clouds. Cost and proprietary reasons. I am happy to use external drive units for storage, I need to move the files to the drive though.

There are some pretty good U tube tutorials but my old head (48k of RAM left) finds the process somewhat daunting. I will try the Medic info pack, using Canon’s RAW processing is great although it does not offer the flexibility of LR.

Moving on, I reckon the edit programs by and large are pretty good. The idea of filing and processing in one spot is very attractive.
Thank you for the post and the info contained.
Regards JM

[Journeyman]

What I should have added, I would like to use Lightroom. I find the LR procedures somewhat confusing to me as a beginner.