Drive Letter / Missing Folders on Mac

[mayrhofs]

I just switched from a PC to a Macbook and all of my photos in Lightroom are showing up as missing. The photos are located in folders by date on an external harddrive that on my PC went by the drive letter E. If I understand correctly, Mac doesn't function with drive letters, so I'm unable to change the drive letter back to E and recover the missing files in Lightroom on my new Macbook.

Unfortunately I never created a parent folder under drive E and now have hundreds (maybe thousands) of dated folders under the following file structure (photo attached). When I try to locate the missing files in Lightroom, I can only locate the folders one at a time, which isn't a viable option considering the vast amount of folders that there are under drive E. Is there any way that I can locate and update all of these folders at once?

Thanks so much,

Sophia

[Just Shoot Me]

The real problem is more than likely that external drive is formatted in the Windows NTFS format which OS X can read but can't natively right to it.

Where is your catalog file stored, on the external drive or did you copy if over and place it on the internal drive of your Mac?

In LR on the entry that says E, not the top entry E but the one at the top of the folder list with all the subfolders below it, right click on it and select Update Folder Location. Browse to the external drive, it should have a Name and select that name. If that works your problems are only half over. Post back what happens and we'll go from there.

[dj_paige]

right click on it and select Update Folder Location.

Find Missing Folder

[mayrhofs]

I did that, but I have hundreds of folders, so that it would take me days to update them all individually. There is no parent folder above them:/

[mayrhofs]

@ Just Shoot Me, thanks for your answer... the photos are still on an external harddrive. I installed NTFS on my Mac, so I'm able to read and write onto the external harddrive just fine between both Mac and PC.

I'm not sure what you mean with the "entry that says E but not the top entry E"? There isn't a parent folder under E - all hundreds of folders named by date are stored directly under E, which I can't change the name of on my Macbook. I can update the folder location for each date folder individually, but with hundreds of these folders, that will take me days..

[dj_paige · Accepted solution]

mayrhofs

Right click on any folder and select Show Parent Folder. Then do a Find Missing Folder on the parent folder.

[mayrhofs]

Ok, thank you so much! I think this fixed it. I was able to click on "find the missing folder" on drive E this time!

All of my photos appear to have been found, but now under the "Catalog" section (at the left hand side right under Previous Import) all of the photographs are now filed under "Missing Photographs" when they don't appear to be missing anymore? At least it updated all the thumbnails and the exclamation points disappeared...

[Jao vdL]

>all of the photographs are now filed under "Missing Photographs" when they don't appear to be missing anymore?

This folder tends to take a while to get with the times especially if you have hundreds of folders that you reconnected. You might need to quit and reopen Lightroom for it to stop showing all these images as missing.