Lightroom 5 Folders Missing from Navigator

I've googled the heck out of this one, and must not be asking the right way.

Question -- How come LR5 is not seeing my folders in the navigator bar.


Situation -- I work across two computers. I use a portable drive for my data. Yesterday, I worked on two jobs, creating two folders and uploading files, both to the portable drive. All was well.

Today, I am on computer number two, and when I open the navigator pane, the two folders are missing, and there is no indication of them. The images are present on my drive, and the folders are in the correct location.

What could be my problem? Can I get LR to see the folders AND my edits with some sort of restore command?

Thanks for your help!

Is the Lightroom catalog file (it'll be called whatever.lrcat) also on the portable drive?
If you have two different Lightroom catalog files on your two different computers, that's the root of your problem.

To see the files, I think you can use Synchronize Folder to add the folders and files to the Navigator hierarchy. But that might not get the edits, if they're store as part of the catalog and not as part of the DNG or XMP sidecar file.

If the edits are part of your Lightroom catalog(s), I think you'll want to use "export as catalog" and "import as catalog" features to move/copy them between computers.

Like Nathan said: Assuming that the portable storage drive connects to the two computers with the same letter designation (or name if Mac), on comp. 1 select the two folders and do "Export as catalog", transfer that .lrcat file to comp. 2 and do "Import from catalog", delete the transfer file.

Like Nathan said, the new folders/images have to be Imported into the second LR catalog, and there are different ways of approaching this, you can use the "File/Import from Another Catalog" function, first making sure that, as Nathan puts out there, the "source" catalog is on the external drive (either directly stored there or using the "Export as Catalog" function in Computer#1.

That is the "straightforward" way to ensure that all metadata is transferred over.

A second approach is to use the LR "Save Metadata to File" in the Computer#1 LR, and then you can transfer the metadata to the LR#2 library by either using the "Synchronize" function if the new catalogs are in your LR#2 file/folder "hierarchy" or by doing an Import of the new folders, which should read in the Metadata. If the Metadata is for some reason "missing", make sure that the folders with the original Raw files contain the "sidecar" xmp Metadata files for each Raw file, then if the images have been imported into LR#2 you can do a "Read Metadata from File" to get the missing metadata, although certain Catalog-specific info doesn't show up this way (Collections, for example). That's why the Export/Import process is the more straightforward and efficient way.

OK, I blame Jack Daniels.

Anyway, I inadvertently stuck these photos in another catalog. Once I found them, I just used import "move" to relocate.

Can't drink while I photoshop, can't photoshop without drinking.........

Well, glad you got it, umm, "settled"...!