Red folders...

[Marcst]

After a reinstall of my Windows machine, I have moved the physicall location of my images from somewhat like c:\a\photos to say c:\b\photos. After I imported the database on the reinstalled Lightroom 1.2 I got tons of red folders of course.

I thought pointing Lightroom just to the correct location of one of the missing folders should be sufficient. But LR isn’t clever enough to see that all subfolders have moved from \a\photos\xxx to \b\photos\xxxx. Do I really have to spend a couple of hours now correcting each path or is there any more intelligent way to tell LR where the photos have gone to?

Any help s greatly appreciated.

Best,
Marc

[Nat Coalson]

Sometimes you have to wait a while. After relinking to the highest-level folder you can, give LR some time and see if everything gets updated - it should.

For this purpose, rather than having all your separate folders at the disk root, it helps to actually have them inside one folder. That way you can just relink the top-level folder and everything underneath comes in too (eventually).

Also, I've noticed that LR on Mac is much better at keeping track of files than it is on Windows.

[Marcst]

Thanks for your response. I am however not sure I do understand everything correctly:

Sometimes you have to wait a while. After relinking to the highest-level folder you can, give LR some time and see if everything gets updated - it should.

What should I link to the highest-level folder? Clicking on a red folder LR asks for a link to the missing folder and doesn’t do anything when pointing to a folder higher up in the hierarchy. So is there any function like “all of my images are within this folder?”

For this purpose, rather than having all your separate folders at the disk root, it helps to actually have them inside one folder. That way you can just relink the top-level folder and everything underneath comes in too (eventually).

I have done so but it does not help. Even waiting for hours LR does not really get the simply the top folder has changed.

Also, I've noticed that LR on Mac is much better at keeping track of files than it is on Windows.

 Well, in reverse this means even when doing everything right, LR might fail? If I remember correctly, Jeff said so in the tutorial, too.

[tomrock]

You must have a lot of folders if this is going to take you a couple of hours. It took me a couple of minutes when I moved my library to an external 2.5" drive. But I only had about 50 folders.