Help! External drive import. newbie

[Kelly san]

Hi

Geez, I'm so confused.  So I followed a YouTube video on how to drag and drop your internal drive photos into a folder you create on an external drive.  I did what they said and transferred over 1000+ photos to obviously create space on my mac drive.  So, now I can see the photos in their new home on the external drive BUT here's what I don't understand.  1)  I don't know how to take those photos into the Develop stage.  It's asking to import them.  What?  Why would I want to do that.  When I dragged and dropped them into my external drive, didn't the .xmp files get moved too?  And if they didn't where are they?  And why is LR asking me to import the photos?  Ugh....

In order to work on the photos I moved to my external, it is asking me to import them.

I need help, clearly!

Thanks in advance.

K

[SeanMcCormack]

If you moved the photos outside Lightroom, it doesn't know that they're moved and thinks they're new files, needing import. If they were in Lightroom, you need to click on the ? on a file and use the dialog to reconnect the missing file.

Another option is to move the files back, and then move them inside Lightroom.

[Theresa J]

It sounds like you don’t really understand the relationship between the Lightroom catalog and your image files. Here are a couple short articles I wrote about moving folders, and fixing broken links that might help.

Can I move my Lightroom photos to a new hard drive. | Orchard View Color

Lightroom lost my photos. Why? | Orchard View Color

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

Please clarify a few things.

When you did the drag and drop, did you do this in Lightroom, or in your operating system?

When it is asking you to import the photos — what is asking you? what are the exact words?

Have these photos already been imported into Lightroom before you did the drag and drop?

[Kelly san]

Thanks for replying to this email everyone.  Feeling like I need to hide somewhere now.  I don't know why but the control panel with Library, Develop, Map, Book, Slideshow etc was missing and all I could see was an import button at the bottom left of the screen.  Somehow the control pane was closed down.  Didn't know the option was there to do that and somehow LR automatically did. 

When I opened it, I see that I can take my photos that I moved to my external drive and edit them in Develop and they have all their info with them.  Phew!  I will continue to study up more on LR and their catalog system etc.

Thanks for your time