Lightroom Workflow / Strategy Question

[Photo-John]

Lightroom seems to have screwed up the catalog directories for one of my external drives. This is likely because the drive is on a USB hub and so the drive letter is somewhat dynamic. Now I have to figure out how to get the directories from that drive - now listed under two drive letters in the Lightroom catalog - back into one. Does anyone know if two Lightroom catalogs can be merged into one? And would it be best if I just started from scratch and just created a whole new Lightroom catalog from that drive. If I do create a new catalog, how can I preserve all of the changes I made in Lightroom? I know they'd be preserved if I'd converted everything to the DNG format. But of course, I didn't. Is there an easy way to convert everything to DNG now?

How should I proceed. Work is getting held up because I don't know what to do.

Thanks in advance for any help I can get...

[SmartWombat]

As long as you don't touch the MOVE option it ought to be OK.

Did you turn on the XMP sidecar files?
They contain a log of your changes, a duplicate effectively of what's in the catalog.
If you did, then re-importing will bring in the current image settings - not sure about the history.

Otherwise Lightroom 2.2 was meant to solve this kind of issue, by allowing you to re-discover the location of the photos. I'll have to set up a catalog and deliberately break it to work out how though.

In the beta it screwed up royally and lost everything. But I was working on a second copy of my 2008 images on a sacrificial hard drive so it was OK

[jorgemonkey]

On the missing folders you should be able to right click the top folder in LR & select "Update Folder Location". I do that a fair amount while moving photos from laptop -> desktop.

Also the "Synchronize Folder" option is fantastic. Its amazing how many images would have fallen through the cracks without that option.

[drg]

John,

There are two possible fixes that are fairly straightforward.

First:

- If you know where the files are supposed to be i.e. PATH=DriveLetter(name):\directory\Folder\etc.\miss ing_file_name
- then you can move or copy those files to the device (PATH=DriveLetter(name):\directory\Folder\etc.\fil e_name and then
Lightroom will 'see' it again.

Second:

Search (via the Windows search command) the physical drive where the images are located. Note or leave open the search window when you find the file.

(for the following to work you have to know where the file(s)/photo(s) are newly located)

In Lightroom in the Library Module select via 'click' the image that is missing as indicated by the little question (?) mark and Press Ctrl 'R'.

- The Ctrl 'R' command will open a Confirm window that tells you, yes, the FILE IS MISSING and shows where it is supposed to be and asks if you want to locate the file.

(Note: The Ctrl 'R' is handy in the First method above to determining where exactly the replaced files go)

-Click Locate box.
-Got to file in the appropriate directory in the 'NEW' location.
-Click on the file name from above. The one selected via Ctrl 'R.
-Be sure the 'Find nearby missing photos' is checked. That is the default. This will grab all the photograph files in the directory that have been previously imported into Lightroom.

**** All the nearby missing files will now be 'updated' and appear in the new Location in the Navigator Panel (left side) of the Library Module.

You should be back in business.

I Export files to new drives and that prevents them from 'disappearing' and being left with only thumbnails.

Or, I create a separate Catalog that is on the physical drive. Then all I have to do is open the drive\folder and click on the Catalog (*.lrcat) name associated with that set of images. Catalogs can be named anything you want, such as a customer or project, and they will appear then as customer_name.lrcat in your folder of choice. The catalog can be in the same drive\directory as the image files.

I'll pm you as well

- C

[SmartWombat]

I didn't use the Ctrl+R shortcut, simply clicked on the ? icon in grid view.
Ctrl+R seems to be the shortcut for the "Show in Explorer" menu option.
Worked as described

But it has an interesting side effect.
Moving everything around in the Navigator panel is a little disconcerting.
The way my images are organised is a folder by Year, subfolder by subject, subfolder by date.
Moving just one image to test this resulted in it disappearing from the original folder name.
And then a new folder appearing in the tree, holding the image.

Problem is, John, if your drive names keep moving about, this is going to happen again and again. Although it's fairly easy to solve, I'd find it a PITA (pain in the acronym?).