A 20,000 Item Mess

December 15, 2009 9:34 AM

Before I set up Adobe Lightroom on my new IMac, help me figure out how to clean up my catalogs with 20,000+ photographs.

My lightroom catalogs are a mess. My hard drive crashed last year and in the restoring process lightroom took a hit. About 10% of the pictures have a ? mark next to them with a an "offline or missing" message. Most of the pictures are actually there but I don't want to have to locate 1000 pictures. I also have a large group of folders which also have question marks next to them. I only want to import to the new computer after I have a clean catalog. Can I delete folders in my catalog?

posted by Xurando to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

Usually, I find that if you right click on the folder icon on the left side in gallery view and then locate that folder, it will then find all the images within. NOTE! If you start by finding images within folders, it never seems to be able to find based on the folder--that is, you can import based on full folders (all the images in the folder are missing), but not part folders (some images have been found).

I've screwed up my library structure several times, and it has never been as much work as I thought, provided I started with my folders FIRST. Good luck!
posted by Admiral Haddock at 9:57 AM on December 15, 2009