adobe lightroom ???

anderson_paul

Well I just picked up adobe lightroom about a week ago, Love it what a great program for your work flow. I also picked up a great video training guide that has taught me a lot, BUT I made one mistake and not sure how to fix it!! :dunno I imported all my photo's, worked find but I have now added a second external hard drive and in do so I have now moved all my photos to my external drives along with backing them all up on another to save space and speed on my main computer, so what has happen is when I bring up lightroom it shows the thumb nails but once I click them to work with the image it tells me it can not find the images I have previously imported so I hoping some one can tell me how to fix this problem??

Thanks Paul

hawkeye978

I haven't worked with Lightroom but I have worked with Photoshop Elements and I think it may be the same issue. In Elements, if you want to move photos to another location you have to have Elements do it otherwise it loses track of them. What your describing with Lightroom is the same thing that is seen in Elements if you move files yourself. If it's the same as Elements, Lightroom is generating a database that it's managing and it has to perform all moves, deletions, etc otherwise it can't update the database and track everything. Not positive that is what you have but sure sounds like it.

claudermilk

This is typical of a DAM app--which LR is a very lightweight version of for the initial cataloging module. If Adobe did it right there should be some kind of function to tell it where you moved the files to get things back in synch; then for later there should be a way of moving them from within LR to avoid this problem.

Just remember, once you've added image files to a DAM database any further file operations must be done from within the DAM to maintain db integrity.

jfriend

anderson_paul wrote:

Well I just picked up adobe lightroom about a week ago, Love it what a great program for your work flow. I also picked up a great video training guide that has taught me a lot, BUT I made one mistake and not sure how to fix it!! I imported all my photo's, worked find but I have now added a second external hard drive and in do so I have now moved all my photos to my external drives along with backing them all up on another to save space and speed on my main computer, so what has happen is when I bring up lightroom it shows the thumb nails but once I click them to work with the image it tells me it can not find the images I have previously imported so I hoping some one can tell me how to fix this problem??

Thanks Paul

Tom is right. Lightroom keeps track of where your photos are located in a database. If you move them to a different location outside of Lightroom, it will not know where they are anymore. There are a couple of possibilities to fix your situation. What I would probably suggest trying first is to move the images back to their exact original location (where Lightroom last saw them). Then open lLightroom and verify that you can open them again. Then, if they all show fine in Lightroom, use Lightroom to move them to the new drive.

If you don't want to do it this way or this way doesn't work, then Lightroom probably has some sort of function called "Reconnect Missing Files" and you can try that.

luke_church

anderson_paul wrote:

....I have previously imported so I hoping some one can tell me how to fix this problem??

Sure. Open the Library view, expand folders, or find an image that you're looking for.

Either right click on a folder and select 'Locate Missing Folder', or click on the '?' next to the images and click 'Locate'.

Then point Lightroom to the new location of the folder or the file, and it'll resync to the images.

I do this fairly routinely, and it seems to work with no problems.

Hope this helps,

Luke

William M Porter

Paul,

Looks like you've already gotten the solution to your problem from Luke. Just want to add a two small points.

1. Lightroom's functions become a sort of substitute for the functions of the Mac OS X Finder or the Windows desktop and it's best to let Lightroom do things like renaming files, moving files, etc. In this respect, Lightroom is not at all unique. Apple's iPhoto used to rearrange your photos so completely that it was nearly impossible to use the Finder to organize them - which was exactly what Apple wanted, and preciselyl for this good reason, that using two different file management programs is a recipe for disaster. Google's Picasa is a rare and I'm inclined to say brilliant exception to the rule. It seems to store info about images in a special file inside the folder. If you move the folder - say, to another hard disk - the info moves with it. But even with Picasa, you will probably run into trouble with albums that you've created.

2. Nevertheless, I have found Lightroom's file management features to be really good. I store all my photos on an external drive and import them "by reference only," which means that Lightroom is NOT actually storing the images itself in its own database, just a reference to the images. Seems to work very well.

I love Lightroom. I like the tone-mapping feature in Lightzone from Lightcrafts even more than the tone curve in Lightroom; the Lightzone feature is more intuitive and also seems to be more precise, as you can control more distinct tonal zones. But that aside, in just about every other respect, I think Lightroom is the cat's pajamas. It's overkill for anyone who shoots just a few images a week - in other words, for a normal hobbyist. But if you're a pro or a manic hobbyist and have to process hundreds of photos routinely, then Lightroom is very hard to beat.

Will