That stinks

how frustrating. I moved all pictures from computer to external hard drive, now when I try to look at photos in lightroom it says it cant find. Its says its offline or missing.

I didn't know that when you import photos to lightroom that they don't stay in lightroom....grrrr. Seems like a very strange set up.

I can import photos to my iphoto and then move photos over to my external hard drive but the photos don't disappear from iphoto.

Please help am I missing something. I am new to this lightroom program.

Lightroom only mirrors your file structure.

If you move, change, delete or add files files from outside of LR then LR can't know what you've done.

Best way to migrate files like you did is to EXPORT as a Catalog. That way, everything on the old drive goes to the new and LR won't miss a beat.

Lightroom only refers to original images, where ever they happen to be. They are not "in" Lightroom. Lightroom is just a database of thumbnails and changes that have been applied to your original files.

If you move your original images outside of Lightroom, it will have no way of knowing where you moved them to until you tell it. As long as the structure didn't change, you can usually tell it where to find one file and it'll figure out the rest itself.

http://help.adobe.com …71-891D-DA04EF388E29.html

When I move my pictures from my laptop to my server, I move them in LR so that the LR library gets updated with the new location. This way all the adjustments made are kept and the files are moved. There might be an other way to do this, but this way works for me.

Click on the question mark and choose "Find missing folder", then navigate to the new location. If you have nested folders, navigate to the highest folder in the hierarchy and it will find the sub folders.