You can also Right-click any photo’s thumbnail in
the Library module and choose Show in Finder (PC:
Show in Explorer) to see where that specific photo is
stored. It’s critical that you understand this relationship
between the catalog and your photos. LrC simply refers
to where photos are stored on your system by storing
the exact path, from the volume name (PC: drive letter)
to the individual filename (and every folder in between).
If you move, rename, or delete files outside LrC, you
render the path stored in the catalog invalid, and LrC
responds by telling you that folders and photos are
offline or missing.
Here’s a simple way to check your entire catalog to
see if it considers any photos to be offline or missing.
First, connect all external drives where your photos are
stored and, if you use network storage, ensure you’re
on your network. Then, from the Library module, go to
Library>Find All Missing Photos. That will start a process
to check the entire catalog for any broken links to photos.When the process is done, ideally you want to see this
little prompt appear saying No Missing Photos.
If instead, you get a temporary collection appearing
full of photos it considers offline or missing, you’ll want
to check out my article on what to do “When Photos
Go Missing.”
You can avoid this situation by ensuring that you do
all of your renaming, moving, and deleting of photos and
folders from within LrC. This gets the job done as well
as keeping the catalog up to date on the changes you’re
making. One area where I see the most self-inflicted
injuries is when people look at a long list of date-based
folders created by the LrC import process, and decide
to reorganize the contents of those folders (especially
around the start of the new year). Here’s a simpler idea:
Just rename the folders to something more meaningful
from within LrC. For example, I recently came across a
trove of old vacation photos I hadn’t imported into LrC
so, after import (using the default date-based naming
system), I simply reviewed the contents of each folder
and then renamed the folder in the Folders panel to add
identifying information to go along with the date.
This took me several minutes, and was so much easier
than re-organizing the photos into new folders. Just
Right-click any folder in the Folders panel and choose
Rename from the contextual menu that appears. Then,
enter the new name in the Rename Folder dialog and
click Save to rename the folder on disk and update
the catalog.
The other benefit to renaming folders is that you
can then use the filter at the top of the Folders panel
to quickly find folders that match what you type into
that field. So, if I want to find all the folders with the
word “Florida,” I just enter that in the field, and they
all show up. Pretty handy! To learn more about the
power of the Folders panel, check out my article on
understanding its role.I hope you find this article helpful, but if you have
any questions about anything I covered, or related things
I didn’t get to squeeze in, you can always ask me in the
KelbyOne Community. Happy New Year! nf UNDER THE LOUPEALL IMAGES BY ROB SYLVAN KELBYONE.COM