- [Instructor] It is very likely that at some point
along the way, photos will turn up missing
in your Lightroom Classic catalog.
It's happened to me and I'm pretty sure
it'll happen to you too.
Let me show you why this happens and how you can fix it
if it does.
We'll start with a quick review of
Lightroom Classic catalog's relationship to your photos.
Remember, the photos do not live inside of the catalog.
Lightroom Classic simply points to their location
and if you move things around outside of Lightroom,
Lightroom will lose the connection to your photos.
I'll jump out to my hard drive to show you how this works.
I'm viewing the exercise files folder here.
Let's take the first folder for chapter two
and just rename it.
I'll do a right click and we'll put an X at the end
of the name, something simple.
And then I'll switch back to Lightroom Classic,
and immediately the folder in the folders panel
gets a question mark on it and notice that all the images
in that folder have exclamation marks.
This tells us that Lightroom Classic has lost connection
with the photos, it doesn't know where they are anymore.
We can still view the photos because of the preview images
that are inside of Lightroom, but we can't do anything
with these until we fix the connection.
So, we know what we did to lose the connection.
We can fix it right here within Lightroom,
by doing a right click or a control click on this folder,
we can choose find missing folder and we can find the folder
that it lost connection to.
So I'll select the chapter 02 with the x,
say choose and immediately, bam, everything comes back.
No question mark, no exclamation marks.
And if we look in the folders panel here,
the folder has been updated with the new name.
Missing photos is the number one Lightroom user complaint.
To avoid this problem, do not go outside of Lightroom
to move or rename folders or images after you've imported
them into Lightroom.
If you have to move or rename something,
you can do it right here inside of Lightroom.
So let's rename this folder back to the correct name.
I'll do a right click or a control click.
I'll come down here to rename and I'll just remove the X
from there and say, save.
And if I jumped back out to the hard drive,
we'll see that that new name has been updated out here
on the drive.
You can also create folders by clicking on the folder icon.
If you add a folder here, it's going to create it
on the drive.
You can also move folders by just simply dragging
and dropping them to another location
and that will actually physically move the folders
out on the drive.
So, any changes you want to make to folders
or images on the drive, they should be done here
inside of Lightroom Classic.
If you follow that procedure,
you'll never have photos come up missing.