Zero Confidence in Catalog Merge - Here's why...

[andybeales]

Merge a Catalog into your mast from your external drive, and then point a standard import at the director on that external drive that holds your photos, and tick 'Don't import suspected duplicates', it will show you loads of files it thinks are missing. This is stressful, where is the fault, the catalog merge, the importer, we need total confidence in these tools. I would ask Adobe but they close weekends.

1. Note Master catalog X no. of photographs in catalog

2. Note Travel catalog XX no. of photographs in catalog

3. Import travel catalog when logged in to master.

4. It completes, note summary about existing data etc... new, tick box to create virtual copies with settings etc...

5. Check last imported no is XX

6. Check Master catalog is now X+XX=XXX no. of photographs in catalog

7. Correct!

8. Pick some random folders I know were not in the master but were in the travel and compare no.s

PARANOID IT GUY - DID IT REALLY WORK, CAN I TRUST THIS EVER SLOWER SOFTWARE?

8. Go to standard import (don't worry I don't actual click import) and point it at the Lightroom Photos folder of the catalog I just imported on the SSD external disk.

9. Select DON'T IMPORT SUSPECTED DUPLICATES

10. Wait ages and see how many it thinks it needs to import

11. Bl00dy h3ll it's loads!

12 WHY?

I was so worried I nearly start rolling back the merge of 3 previous catalogues, which took ages to do, especially with recording stats and check between, taking my time, doing things right, making sure all catalogs are correctly Adobe Lightroom Classic CC, backup export of each catalog at various steps etc... but now I see my master seems to have the data inside, but it would take too long to check everything manually. It would appear this this might be a problem with the 'don't import susceptive duplicates' option, that that functions thinks the are not inside the catalog, which I have never come across before. How about you?

Right now this is my situation: I am not confident in the catalog merge and the don't import suspect duplicates function. I am making another backup of this catalog file on exit, making sure the optimise catalog on exit is ticked also.

IS THIS THE SAME FOR ANYONE ELSE?

My Background

My background is IT and data before coming a pro photographer. I installed data centres way back in 2000 and run SaaS software before it was popular or much known. I was security and IT admin guy until 2008, and a DB Admin, dealing with all sorts of backups, iron mountain, tapes, early cloud, clusters, NAS, the first of the Fibre channel, bla bla. So you can guess I go through things carefully. I am now a full time travel photographer, shooting and leading about 50 workshops a year. I run G-Tech G-Studios Raid 5, all sort of stuff, Samsung T5 1TB drives on the go. I have a digital diary log for backup or data events so there is never confusion. I still make mistakes, but try not to with my photos. I take screen shots at each step and detailed notes and make records. I am using Lightroom Classic CC, most up to date version no. 7.1 with 10.1 camera raw on mac.

[Jim Wilde]

Have you confirmed that those "loads of images" that your Master catalog tries to import from the Lightroom Photos folder are definitely already in the Master Catalog? You only need to make a note of one filename from the Import Panel, cancel the import, then search for that filename in the Master catalog.

Or what happens if you open the Travel Catalog again, and do the same thing, i.e. try an import from the Photos folder to see if that also detects loads of images that it thinks are new.

If I was to do that on my own Master Catalog, i.e. try an import from my images Parent Folder with duplicates checking enabled, I would expect that some images will be found which would be images that I removed during culling and didn't use the "Delete from Disk" option. Is it possible that's what you are seeing?

[andybeales]

Hi Jim, great idea, thanks for your help and those further suggested checks.

1. The "loads of images" is 30,112 [26,350 in 2017 and 3753 in 2016, plus a few single digits in other years].  I ran an import (not clicking import) just now to check. It takes at least an hour+ to check them.

When I compared the images shown in the new merged live master and the travel catalog I can see it has imported them to the live master merged, based on the multiple random checks I have done. I took a backup of the catalog master before this catalog import, so I compare folder image count and images in a) the current live merged master with the b) original master and c) the travel catalog. It seems to make sense visually and in the data stats.

2016-11-05 - master now 919, pre-merge master 607, travel 312.

So the pre-merge master and travel total the new master, seemly it did import the other catalog ok)

2. When I open the Travel Catalog, I tried importing from the same folder Photos that the travel catalog disk holds all its images in. It had just 2 orphaned files where I probably did not "delete from disk" when deleting.  So no problem here. This is what I expect the main catalog to also be like, as I always "Delete from Disk" and don't have time to delete.

FYI My workflow is based on my 'storage is cheap compared to time' philosophy, so I just import and select winners. I hardly ever delete anything.

To do housekeeping, and for my interest, I also just did this to the merged live master, and it had 20, so I imported the 20 for good measure. Good idea to think of this test Jim, so now at least I know for sure it's not an orphan file.

3. I have also tried other things that should not matter, such as reboot, checking there are no updates. Switching to my wife's (also a photographer) Macbook to recreate it, to rule out my kit, also ticking and unticking the "Don't import suspective dups" and going through every option, expanding and checking all in the import dialog box for the 10th time.

[andybeales]

Opened a support ticket, they can see the issue, seems 'don't import suspective duplicates' is broken in Lr Classic CC. So basically folks you have no way to easily check or be confident if that folder that contains thousands of images and your catalog changes are really in your merged catalog Nice. They closed the support ticket and asked me to log it on another community. Exposure or Capture One are looking good right now

[andybeales]

No way to log a bug, Adobe doesn't do that.

No way to keep a support call open, they don't do that

No way to be informed of a fix, they don't do that

No hope on this, as getting non-classic to classic functionality is the business priority

---- asked to post on photoshop.com

I even made a view to explain the problem, did many more tests, and confirmed a bug.

NEVER IMPORT ANOTHER CATALOG OR MERGE YOU WILL LOSE THE ABILITY TO KNOW IF PHOTOS AROUND YOUR NETWORK AND OTHER DRIVES TRULYUELY IN THE CATALOG

Lr Classic CC has no way to be sure if photos are in the catalog. zero. | Photoshop Family Customer ...

[Victoria Bampton LR Queen]

By posting on the bug forum, you have logged a bug. From there, it’ll be prioritised alongside all of the other Classic bugs and feature requests. CC is a different team, so you don’t have to worry about them nicking your Classic resource.