Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2

Another significant yet subtle improvement in Lightroom 2 is the means to reconnect missing and offline folders and photos. While preventing your photos from being inadvertently disconnected from the Lightroom catalog is still just as important as it was in Lightroom 1, it’s good to know there are tools to help you get things back in order if you find yourself looking at a catalog full of question marks.

When you import photos into Lightroom you are essentially telling Lightroom where on your hard disk to find those photos. That location information is stored inside the Lightroom catalog along with all the metadata embedded in each photo. If you use Lightroom to move, rename, or delete photos (and you should only use Lightroom for those tasks), then that information is updated inside the catalog as part of the process.

The place where people can run into trouble is when they move, rename, or delete photos outside of Lightroom, which then results in the data contained in the catalog becoming out of sync with the actual state of those photos.

Lightroom lets you know when it can no longer connect to the source photos by displaying a question mark icon on all the affected photos and folders.

Another significant change in Lightroom 2 is the Volume Browser. If an entire drive is offline or missing, you will also see that the disk label on that Volume Browser is dimmed and the indicator light is dark gray.

If you use one or more external drives, then you may see this quite often if/when you operate Lightroom without those drives being connected (as in the capture above). As soon as you reconnect that drive to your computer, you will see the label turn white and the indicator change color to reflect the amount of free space on that drive. The question marks on all the folders and photos on that drive will also go away.

Lightroom was designed to operate with disconnected drives, so this isn’t a problem at all. In fact if Lightroom has already generated standard-sized previews for all the photos on that offline drive, you can still work with the offline photos in all modules except Develop. You can print in draft mode, which uses the previews, as well as create slideshows and web galleries from those previews. However, you can’t export or send photos to an external editor since Lightroom needs to access the actual source photo for those operations.

Unfortunately, too often I see people facing the problem of dealing with missing or offline photos because they made a change to the path to those photos outside of Lightroom (i.e. move or rename). This is where Lightroom’s reconnection function comes into play.

Dealing With Deleted Photos

If you deleted photos outside of Lightroom, but still see the thumbnails inside of Lightroom, then this is the easiest problem to fix. Just select the thumbnails in Lightroom’s Grid view and press Delete. Choose Remove when prompted and they will be removed from the catalog.