Lightroom Lost All photos

[tlabuda]

Ok so I recently upgraded to LR 2015.8 and everything was fine. I opened my LR to export the remaining photos and all of them are now 'lost'. I did not move them to an external as my external was being used to back up my phone earlier this week. That being said, all my edited photos that were currently finished and I had no problem coming back and working on them are now unable to be found. I did NOT move anything outside of LR or inside for that matter. Literally opened LR and the photos are now missing. Backups are blank and when I do the 'find missing folder' it does nothing the photo titles are generic or they are classified as volumes/etc. I have no idea where the photos went or why this has happened. Please help!

[Geoff the kiwi]

First, keep calm. Your photos will be on the disk most likely!! They are never in Lightroom, what you see is a catalog of files on Disk.

Now can you see them on your hard drive??

If you search for files with .lrcat (they are Lightroom catalog files) how many do you see and can you post a screen shot of the search result please so we can help find the catalog that has them....

[tlabuda]

is this what you mean?

[Geoff the kiwi]

Thank you, now is that Levi Catalog the one you want??
Is it possible that everything is in the Personal catalog?? You can open any catalog by double clicking the catalog files ending in .lrcat above.

By the way it is not advisable to store the backups (the zip files) on the same drive as the originals. You can set the backup location each time the Backup window is open. Point it to an external backup drive here:

Mine is in the default as I am without my drives with Lightroom and backups while in a cafe answering queries on the forum - and I'm in Gulu, Uganda!!

[F. McLion]

You have multiple catalogs and the one you have currently open is named Nashville .lrcat.

I suggest not to use characters like ' ' (spaces) or '/' in catalog names.

From the file menu in LR, open every of these catalogs and see if one of the others has the photos you're missing.

Ask 3 persons and you'll get at least 4 different opinions ... here's mine regarding multiple catalogs: If there is not a particular, very good reason to work with multiple catalogs, I strongly suggest to work with only one catalog.

As Geoff already said, your photos are not 'in' LR. LR only stores a pointer to it in its database.