The question is why did I lose all my editing and what can I do to get it back?

[Charlie Bassett]

When I was on the form before a week or so I was of the understanding I did not have enough free space so I purchased a new 500 GB SSD for my computer and a new 2TB Ext HD to put my photos on. MY Original ext HD was 1TB and I had only 10% free so I think it was causing the problems with LR Classic. MY computer SSD drive was 250GB with about 70GB free. I moved all my photos and the LR files to the new 2TB hard drive which took 17 Hrs. When  went to use the new drive I had to import all my photos into LR again and when I did that I clicked 1:1 previews( Problem). The import process was not to bad but making the previews was a 3 day process (24 hours x 3=72 Hrs). During the process LR would work and then say not working for the last 24 hours of the 72 hours. The question is why did I lose all my editing and what can I do to get it back? I have a total of 31782 photos. My color labels and stars also do not show up. I am using Lightroom Classic. The problems I was having with LR before were in a earlier form. Those problems have not showed up  But I have not worked on LR that much because I lose all my editing. I would like to get the editing back before I start the process of reediting them all again.

Charlie Bassett

[JohanElzenga]

You say you had to import all your photos again, but you should not have. It sounds like you did not copy your Lightroom catalog to the new drive, but instead let Lightroom create a brand new one. That is why you lost your edits, because edits are stored in the catalog. If you still have access to the backup, restore the Lightroom catalog and start with that.

[Charlie Bassett]

The LR Catalog was on the 1 TB drive and when I copied it to the 2TB

drive the Lightroom folder with the catalog was copied to that drive.

When I look at both drives the lightroom folders look the same. When I

did the import I just Added the photos to lightroom which it said I had

to. What do I do to make my catalog work? the drive names happen to be

different.

[Charlie Bassett]

Do I have do some kind of synchronizing of the catalog?

[Charlie Bassett]

I can use my old drive which I named Photo-Main Folder (D:) and I have

Photo-Main Folder (X:). X is the new drive and D is the old drive. The

old drive has all the editing and stars and color selections. The old

drive has 10% free. How can I get the new drive (X) to have the the

editing ,stars and Color selections?

[JohanElzenga · Accepted solution]

What you need to do is let Lightroom know what the new location of the images is. If you reimport them, Lightroom thinks they are new images, so that is not the way. So start with the original catalog again.

Right-click on the top folder of the old disk in the Lightroom folder panel. You'll get a contextual menu. Depending on whether the old drive is connected or not, you will either see a menu 'Update Folder Location', or 'Find Missing Folder'. Choose that and you'll get a standard 'open' dialog box. Use it to navigate to the folder on the new disk and select it. That will 'reconnect' the folder and all its subfolders, so that Lightroom knows its new location. If you have more than one single top folder, you'll have to repeat this for each of them.

[Charlie Bassett]

I want to thank JohanEI54 for helping me correct my problem. Everything

is working fine.  Thanks for the help.

Charlie B.