LR can't find processed file to import

[andyptak]

I finished processing a file in PS, saved it and it didn't appear back in LR as usual. I checked the folder with Explorer and my TIFF was there. I tried importing it and LR couldn't find it. I tried again and saved it a a PSD, same thing happened. Re-booted the machine and no difference. I'm stuck. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks.

[digitaldog]

Try the sync folder command after selecting it (contextual menu).

[andyptak]

Voila! Thank you.

[andyptak]

After my initial euphoria at Andrew's answer, I'm finding that this wasn't a one time issue. I am now constantly getting the little exclamation mark in the upper right hand corner of a shot, when in grid view, telling me that "Lightroom and another application have made changes to this file" - do I want to copy those changes from disk or use the settings from LR catalog instead? This is after processing in LR and then going into PS and back to LR for a few last tweaks.

I have over 200K images in my catalogue and went through every folder and synched it, which took a few hours, and now every shot that I have processed with a round trip to PS and back have featured this warning message. For some reason information isn't being written properly, I suppose. No idea of what's happening though. Any one have any ideas? Thanks.

[andyptak]

I see that David Eichler has a post about synch issues too. Must be a v10 bug issue. Have to wait for a fix from Adobe I guess.

[john beardsworth]

As I posted to that other thread, yours is a different issue from David's which is about the sync to LR Mobile - environment.

When you started with the file, was it in LR and did you use Edit With Photoshop? What type of file are you sending? Where is the file, on an internal or external hard drive or on some network? In LR, was the grid filtered? How is the grid sorted? If Added Order, you may find the PS saved file at the end or start of the grid.

[andyptak]

Hi John. You asked a lot of good questions. Unfortunately I can't see them while in this reply box, but I'll try to answer as best I can.

I do Edit in Photoshop from Lightroom. Files are dng from a Sony a7r3. I have three internal drives. Drive C is a NVME, drive D is the same and contains my catalog. Drive E is a Samsung SATA SSD and contains all of the data. They all have lots of space on them. They are ordered by file name. Sometimes they're filtered and sometimes not. Haven't paid attention to that fact though so I'll have to check if it makes a difference.

I actually have a few things going on with this new machine. I'm hoping it's just an installation/configuration kind of thing. One of the strangest things is that it is slower to open and close files than my old machine - way slower. I went from a 5 yr old Dell with i7 and 32 gigs RAM and WD Reds, to an Asus with i9 and 64 gig RAM and two NVME drives and an internal SATA SSD. The Asus is water cooled with a fan to cool the radiator and I can hear the fan start to slowly pick up speed when I perform one of these actions and I get the spinning ball thing while the machine takes it's sweet time to open and close files. My old machine did it in a fraction of the time. Strange.

I have the latest versions of PS and LR and I think that there are a few bugs in these releases as well as something going on with my new machine. Because everything is new I don't know which problem stems from what. Thanks.

[pflower]

I don't know if this is related to your problem, but for the past year I have had huge problems in sending files from Lightroom to Photoshop and then back again.  It doesn't matter what the original file is - 3FR from Hasselblad, or Raw from Sony or tiffs.  They open fine in Photoshop, I make the corrections I want and then save.  But they don't appear in Lightroom from where I sent them (i.e if I send a file from Lightroom to PS from a filtered selection via keyword or collection they don't appear back in the keyword selection or in the collection).  However they are properly saved in the original folder and they have the same keywords as the Raw file.  In the keyword filter the number is increased by the new file but it is not visible in the Library module although the original Raw file is marked 2/2 - but 1/2 is not visible.   Going to the folder in Lightroom and it is there.  Syncing that folder doesn't bring them back into visibility in the Library Module - simply because the sync command doesn't recognise that there is a new file.  The only thing that works is quitting LR and then restarting - and then the new file(s) are visible in the Library Module under the keyword filter and in collections.

I have had 4 long sessions with Adobe support - all with remote access to my computer.  The problem has been elevated up the hierarchy of Adobe support who all express surprise and promise to come back the next day but never do.  I am on Mac - updating OS, LR and Photoshop doesn't help.  I have used LR since version 1 and this has only manifested itself since last winter.  I have looked at whether there are disk permission problems but no joy and explored with Adobe support everything they can think of.  So the only way I can work with round trips to Photoshop is starting in the folder where the original Raw file is stored - then restarting LR if I want to filter by keyword or collections.

Frustrating - but it seems that you and I may be the only people with this problem?

If you come to any conclusions please post them. 

Hi John. You asked a lot of good questions. Unfortunately I can't see them while in this reply box, but I'll try to answer as best I can.

I do Edit in Photoshop from Lightroom. Files are dng from a Sony a7r3. I have three internal drives. Drive C is a NVME, drive D is the same and contains my catalog. Drive E is a Samsung SATA SSD and contains all of the data. They all have lots of space on them. They are ordered by file name. Sometimes they're filtered and sometimes not. Haven't paid attention to that fact though so I'll have to check if it makes a difference.

I actually have a few things going on with this new machine. I'm hoping it's just an installation/configuration kind of thing. One of the strangest things is that it is slower to open and close files than my old machine - way slower. I went from a 5 yr old Dell with i7 and 32 gigs RAM and WD Reds, to an Asus with i9 and 64 gig RAM and two NVME drives and an internal SATA SSD. The Asus is water cooled with a fan to cool the radiator and I can hear the fan start to slowly pick up speed when I perform one of these actions and I get the spinning ball thing while the machine takes it's sweet time to open and close files. My old machine did it in a fraction of the time. Strange.

I have the latest versions of PS and LR and I think that there are a few bugs in these releases as well as something going on with my new machine. Because everything is new I don't know which problem stems from what. Thanks.

[andyptak]

It really is a PITA isn't it?

I'm also finding that the shots which do successfully come back into LR - not all become orphaned - have that little exclamation mark in the upper right corner that says changes have been made in another application and do I want to copy those changes from disk to the LR catalog? There's obviously some sort of handshake between PS and LR as shots come back from one and into the other and that just isn't happening.

Unfortunately I got a new PC at the same time as the new versions of LR and PS became available and I have a bunch of things happening that shouldn't. I don't know if it's the new PC or bugs in the latest releases, because the software and the hardware are both new and I have no collective history with them to fall back on for comparison.

It's a good job that I'm still unemployed because of Covid because if I was trying to process real jobs at the moment I'd really be in trouble.

If I come across anything helpful about our mutual problem I'll let you know. In the meantime, good luck and keep well.

[digitaldog]

Something or someone is messing with the files outside of LR hence the exclamation point. See:
https://helpx.adobe.com/in/lightroom-classic/help/locate-missing-photos.html

[andyptak]

Hi Andrew. The exclamation doesn't tell me the files are missing and I get a total of zero when I ask to find missing files because there are none. My exclamation tells me that the shot was changed by an outside program (PS) and the change is not reflected in the catalog - even though I sent the finished PS file right back to LR. It just doesn't update the file for some reason.

This is separate from the issue of the ones who don't make it back to the catalog from PS at all and I have to Synch the folder to find and import them.

I'm thinking of deleting LR and re-installing but my catalog contains over 200K images and it takes forever to rebuild it. However, if the issue is really coming from PS then this wouldn't help. I don't want to delete PS because that really took me a long time to bring in and install all of my plug ins, extensions, brushes, actions, etc., etc.
Agghhh!

[pflower]

I haven't found a solution or even an explanation for my problem - and neither has Adobe.  But, amongst other things that Adobe support had me do, was to delete the preference files.  You can restart LR and reset the preference files upon startup (I think by holding down the shift key?) but Adobe told me not to do that but instead delete the preference files directly from the OS.  Didn't help me but that is the first thing they suggested.  The other thing is to start new catalogs and import a reasonable amount of images (several hundred) into a new catalog and see if the problem persists in that catalog.  Adobe had me create catalogs on each of my disks - internal and external - to see if there might be some weird disk problem.  Didn't help me but worth trying possibly.

I have spent a long time with my problem and I am recently beginning to wonder if it hasn't something to do with the use of the graphics processor.  I have no idea why that should be.  But I turned off the auto use of the graphics processor which didn't help at all - in fact made things worse in some respects.  But then I turned it back on to custom - use for display only and not processing.  With that setting I do have a catalog of 5-600 images that behaves reasonably normally most (but not all) of the time but it hasn't helped my main catalog with some 95k images which still stubbornly refuses to display saved files from Photoshop.  But might be worth your experimenting with.

Hi Andrew. The exclamation doesn't tell me the files are missing and I get a total of zero when I ask to find missing files because there are none. My exclamation tells me that the shot was changed by an outside program (PS) and the change is not reflected in the catalog - even though I sent the finished PS file right back to LR. It just doesn't update the file for some reason.

This is separate from the issue of the ones who don't make it back to the catalog from PS at all and I have to Synch the folder to find and import them.

I'm thinking of deleting LR and re-installing but my catalog contains over 200K images and it takes forever to rebuild it. However, if the issue is really coming from PS then this wouldn't help. I don't want to delete PS because that really took me a long time to bring in and install all of my plug ins, extensions, brushes, actions, etc., etc.
Agghhh!

[andyptak]

It never occurred to me that this may be catalog specific. I have a smaller one of about 8K images that I'll try tomorrow.

I also read about deleting Preferences, sounded rather daunting to me. I feared that I might mess it up and make things worse. How did you find the process?

[digitaldog]

Reset prefs is a good idea:
https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-classic/help/setting-preferences-lightroom.html

[andyptak]

I deleted the Preferences this morning and so far, so good. I'm feeling superstitious though and wonder how long his will hold. This BS started for no apparent reason and could come back again at any time. Fingers crossed and thanks everybody for the help.

[andyptak]

I thought my post from above was to good to be true and it was.

I hadn't realized that I was using my smaller catalog with the shots housed on my internal SSD. When I switched to my large catalog with the shots on a NAS the trouble began again. Some differences though.

1. Sending a shot to PS making some changes and bringing it back to LR again results in the TIFF not appearing in LR. This time though Synch Folder does not find and import it. I can see it in Explorer but it's just an orphan. This is new. I used to be able to find it using the Synch Folder command.

2. Making adjustments inside of LR and not going to PS results in an error message once in Library view again. "The Metadata has been changed by both Lightroom and another application (not true, LR only) Should Lightroom import settings from disk or overwrite disk settings with those from the catalog?" I used to get this message only after going to PS and back again. Not all adjustments produce this message though. Clicking Auto Adjust produces no error message. Changing Clarity does, for instance.

I'm thinking of uninstalling LR and then reinstalling. I presume I will still be able to access my current catalogs? I'd hate to have to import 200K plus shots again. Maybe the catalog is the problem though?

I think the fact that I get different results when the shots are on an internal drive or on a NAS might mean something to someone more knowledgeable than me. Does it?

[john beardsworth]

Reinstalling would have little effect.

I would focus on the NAS aspect. Are problem photos on the NAS? If so, can you import some photos from it using the drive letter, not the network address, or use the Update Folder Location context menu to map a folder to the drive letter location.

[andyptak]

I think you may have hit the nail on the head John.

I recently ran out of space on my first NAS and had to buy a second one. Mapping the first NAS to a drive letter had been relatively painless - I'm not a computer guy but was able to do a search on how to do it and it was quite simple and straightforward, even for me. The second NAS however, was a real pain. It just wouldn't work the way that the first one had. I putzed around for over an hour trying this and that, all to no avail. Finally I got a connection, don't ask me how. My brain was totally frazzled at that point and I don't even remember what I did to get the connection finally - but, and probably a very important point, I got a network address to connect to and not a drive letter. I was just so thankful to finally get a connection it never occurred to me that this may end up being problematic.

I can't follow your suggestion for a few hours because I have a large copy job running at the moment, but when it's done I'll try it. Any suggestions about getting a drive letter for this thing because the usual route just didn't work for some reason. Do I have to disconnect from the network address first? If so, what's the dummies version of doing that? Thanks so much.

[andyptak]

Major update. I seem to have fixed all problems but one by changing the one NAS that had a network address and managing to give it a drivel letter. Whew!

The one last issue isn't major but it is a PITA workwise. My other NAS which was always mapped to a drive letter, has four disks and I have it mirrored, so it appears as 2 2 drives only. On the second drive only I am still getting the little exclamation mark when in Grid View which says that changes have been made by Lightroom and another application and would I like to copy those changes from disk or use the settings contained in LR Catalog? I get that even when I haven't made the round trip to PS and back and just used LR adjustments to change the file. The thumbnail shows the changes though and if I click "copy changes from disk" it reverts back to the original, but if I click "copy from LR Catalog settings" the thumbnail retains the changes I have made. 

Each of the two mirrored disks has it's own drive letter and I'm wondering if I should remove that and try substituting another letter and see what happens. 

Thanks everyone for the help so far.