Lightroom Catalog Folder Error

by Victor Augusteo on July 22, 2009

Lately my photos has been filling up my 320gb hard drive (around 55 thousands photos) so I decided to move them to my 1tb external hard drive. I moved them conventionally with Windows Explorer. All is well until I opened Lightroom and noticed all of my folders are marked missing. And to make things worse, Lightroom doesn’t automatically detect the new location of my photos. So I was left with two choices in this matter:

  1. To delete the current catalog and re-import everything
  2. To right click my folders one by one and choose “Locate missing folder” (Lightroom doesn’t support multiple folders locating!)

I decided it was too much pain to follow option two, so I deleted my catalog and re-import my photos. Of course I lost all my edits, but I seldom look through my old edits anyway except for showing my friends how its done.

Lesson of the day

Now for this to not happen to you in the future, you got to remember to move the folders with Lightroom, not Windows Explorer or stuff like that.

If you like this post, you might also like:

  1. How To: Copyright Signature Watermark On Lightroom 2 Using Mogrify Plugin
  2. 7 Reason to Use Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2
  3. How To: Fantastic Mysterious Effect Using Lightroom “300″ Preset
  4. [Lightroom Tutorial] Cropping while breaking aspect ratio
  5. How To: HDR Look From JPG Using Lightroom 2.1

Tagged as: error

Article by

  • http://richardxthripp.thripp.com/ Richard X. Thripp

    This is why I like IMatch, though I don't bother cataloging anything anymore. I track versions manually. I don't take many photos.

    My operating system and programs are on a 40GB partition on my 320GB internal drive. My photos go on the 280GB partition. I have 117GB free, which at my pace will take a year to fill up. Not worried about it.

Previous post:

Next post: