How to undue "remove missing photos from catalog"

[johno44676239]

   I just added a new micro SD card to my surface pro 4 (windows 10) and after moving my images from my HD to the SD card outside of LR (couldn't get it to work inside LR), added my new SD drive as a folder within LR.  I saw all my pictures as expected but noted that most were "missing" I sycronized my folder and left the "remove missing photos from catalog" option selected.  All my photos >2500 are now mapped to my current catalog in the folder structure wanted but I just noticed that they now lack edits and ratings.  Since I allowed LR to remove all missing photos from the catalog, it appears I've lost the way to "find" missing photos and map any of the original ratings and edits back to them.  Can anyone help on this?

[JP Hess]

Have you updated the folder location so that Lightroom knows that the images are on the SD card? If you moved the images and Lightroom is still looking for them in their previous location, that is why they are missing. Do you have a backup catalog you can revert to? Once images have been removed from the catalog Lightroom no longer has any information about them. The only way to "recover" them is to import them again. But if you are still using the same images all of your adjustments should still be in place as soon as you show Lightroom where the images are now located..

[johno44676239]

Thank you for your suggestions.  Yes, I've got LR to see the images in the new drive but they lack ratings and edits.  I have found a LR catalog backup file that should include that metadata from before I told LR to remove the images from the current calalog but I haven't been able to restore LR to using it.  I get a "catalog is not writable or another LR app is using it" and I haven't been able to get past that yet.  I assume that once I get LR using that, the images will be "missing" from there, which is fine because then I should be able to map them to the backup catalog using the new location and all should be back from there. 

[JP Hess]

If you are using Lightroom 6 or Lightroom CC then the catalog backup is stored within a zip file. You need to double-click on zip file and extract the catalog from that file. If you have done that then the catalog file should replace the one you have been using.  If you are getting the message that the catalog is already in use then look in the folder that contains your catalog and look for a file with the LOCK extension. Make sure Lightroom isn't running. If there is a lock file you need to delete it.

[johno44676239]

Thanks, I had gone in a bit of a loop trying to open the catalog from my back up location.  I kept seeing those lock files then once I closed LR, they would delete themselves but was still getting the error message saying LR didn't have permissions or was already using that catalog.  Once I unzipped/extracted the backup catalog file, saved it to my desktop vs. the existing default within my pictures file, shut down LR then tried to open the catalog from my desktop (folder) directly, LR realized I was opening a different catalog and was able to pull it up with all my "missing" metadata.  Big sigh of relief on my end!!!  Now I'm just going through and making sure that this data gets mapped to the image files on my new D: drive (Micro SD card) and I'll be all set.  I know I shouldn't import them from the D: drive.  I'm open to suggestions on how I can best tie them with my metadata.  I'll sign off with how I resolved that one to wrap up the thread.