When Lightroom tells you that it can't find the file you're trying to work on

Many of us have come across LR telling us that 'The file named "xxxxxxxxxx" is missing or offline'

and the first time it happens is a moment of dread; especially if we're unfamiliar with LR and we think it's eaten one of our precious images. If you do get this message on your screen (the above is a screengrab from the develop module, but loupe view in the library module shows the same), LR has a mechanism for finding the files and getting things back in order for you. Heaqd to grid view in the library by pressing G on your keyboard and make sure you're highlighting the file which is missing. On there, you'll see the following "badge" on the thumbnail highlighted in red:

Clicking on that brings up a dialogue box which asks if you would like to locate it. If you moved the files outside of LR (for example in explorer or the finder if you're running an apple pc) and you know where you moved the file, then just use the dialogue to navigate to where you moved the file. Simple, eh?!

A simple solution to this problem not being a problem, is to only use LR to move your files once they're in the catalogue.

There is another one which can come up for missing files and involves you having moved an entire folder from outside the LR interface. This is much more tricky, much much more tricky. Actually, it isn't. It works in a very similar way.

You get the question mark (above) showing on the folder in your Folders panel and every file in the folder shows the missing file badge. This is solved by right clicking on the offending icon, and it is offensive to know you've been a muppet again and moved a folder outside of the LR interface, and selecting "Find missing folder". You again get a dialogue box up in which you can just navigate to where you moved the folder.


The simple solution to this is the same as for a missing file, just don't move folders around outside of the LR interface once you've imported images from it into your LR catalogue.

The above situation for missing folders can happen if you've upgraded the drives in your computer and moved your "Pictures" folder to one of the new drives, just follow the above instructions for the root folder and all folders will then reappear in your LR folders panel instead of one by one. If you don't see the root folder ("Pictures" on windows PC, I don't own an apple PC, so users of those can identify the root folder themselves, if you've left the standard naming conventions and not moved things about), right click on the highest level folder (or one of them) and select "Add parent folder" to display it. Having the root folder of your images displaying by default can help in other ways for organising/finding your images, but that's beyond what I'm writing about here.

HTH in some way for someone,
Matt