Can an Online Tutor Help Me with Lightroom Catalog Problems?

Question

I accidentally deleted my photos from LR (long story), so now I have an exclamation point on all of my photos (56,000 photos). Also, most photos are now blank (gray) whenever I open LR.

I hired a company which recovered nearly all of my photos and put them on an external drive.

I need help with what to do next. Create a new LR catalog? Import the recovered photos? Tell LR to look in the attached external drive?

I'm using LR Classic with Windows 10. I have NOT updated LR to version 11 yet, still using v10.4.

Answer 1

The exclamation mark means the photos cannot be found, because they were moved from their original location. Now that they are on an external hard drive, you can just press on the exclamation mark of one of the photos, and select the new location on the hard drive, and that will solve the problem. Usually if the photos are in the same folder, it will fill in for the rest of the photos as well.

In addition, you could create a new catalog if you want it to be on a separate drive, since you have all the photos back.