Filename compatibility: moved lightroom album from Mac to Windows

[edimi]

I moved my lightroom classic albums from Mac to Windows and faced the following problems.

Folders with | were replaced with a bullet, so I need to manually find the missing folders.

Filenames with the copyright symbol © are also missing, but there are thousands of these files.

Is there any way to bulk fix the missing © symbol files?

Thank you!

[Rob_Cullen]

My WIndows-10 system with Lr v7.3.1 has no trouble reading and showing files with the copyright symbol in the filename.

If your preview thumbnails are showing the 'missing' icon [!] then it is a re-link process, not a re-name, that is required.

I would think that re-linking the Folders might have also corrected the missing files contained within.

Follow the advice at this link-

https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-photos-missing-fix/

[cmgap]

Hi Cosedi - Can you post a screen shot of what you're seeing?

[edimi]

The folder is linked correctly and relinking does not help. Notice that there is no question mark '?' over the folder.

If I rename the file to be without the copyright symbol then find the photo again then it all works.

Keep in mind that the copyright symbol came from on Mac where the symbol might be represented by a character which cannot be in a windows path. I had the same problem with the pipe symbol '|' which cannot be in a folder name in Windows.

[edimi]

Ah I just discovered something. It is not because of the Copyright symbol but the filename in Lightroom appears to have an additional ' ' space before the start of the filename that begins with ' untitled...'. I suspect now that it may be the space that is causing problems.

[Rob_Cullen]

Good sleuthing!

OK, so your files are named like  "Untitled_2012-09-01_18-19-58_©EdwardWei2012.JPG" on the hard-drive,

and Lightroom is looking for the same file named " Untitled_2012-09-01_18-19-58_©EdwardWei2012.JPG"  (with the leading space)

Am I correct?

Renaming the files with File Explorer one-by-one is going to be laborious. You could try just one file to test it.

If the 'space' is your confirmed problem, I suggest you install a file renaming utility that can do a batch delete of the one space in front of filenames with the space. There are many? 'freeware' programs that will do this. I have used an 'old' one-{Lupas Rename} that still works with Windows-10  Lupas Rename 2000

Just "Left Crop" one character:

After the name 'correction' Lightroom should automatically recognize your files and the 'missing' icons will disappear.

[edimi]

Yup, this is exactly what I did. I installed the advanced renamer here

https://www.advancedrenamer.com/download

I'm sure there is a bug somewhere either on Mac where I copied the files from HFS+ to exFAT

or on Windows where I copied from exFAT to NTFS

or in Lightroom to have an additional space before the filename.