Pics Disappeared in Lightroom...HELP

[peakgolf]

I imported my raw photos from my memory card (per instructions in Scott Kelby's Lightroom book) into Lightroom, import went as expected, organizied, put them in Library, edited some of them, piece of cake!!.....after a couple of weeks gone by went into Library and can't find pics, get a gray box with "original file couldn't be found"  Any idea on what happened??  

Thanks in advance,
Jim Parker

[Carl Harsch]

Did you move them with another editor?  LR is a database managed index.  Any file movement must be done within LR or risk losing track of them.

[peakgolf]

Did you move them with another editor?  LR is a database managed index.  Any file movement must be done within LR or risk losing track of them.
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Carl,
Thanks for your reply, if you don't mind my asking what is your workflow from camera to Lightroom Editing?  Think I am trying to read to much into Lightroom and am getting somewhat overwhelmed.

Thanks,
Jim Parker

[The View]

Photos are not stored in Lightroom, but somewhere else on your hard drive, usually in your home folder in "pictures".

They are not backed/up by Lightroom, either, as I read on this forum, only the database is.

So you might have erased the folder that contained your photos... could that be?

And still, if Lightroom can't find your photos, doesn't it display an option to look for them?

I have Martin Evening's Lightroom book, and he mentions this there.