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One the issues that comes up  most frequently in my Lightroom workshops is the “mysterious case of missing pictures”.

You know you have this issue when you see what is shown in the two pictures on the left:

A folder list with question marks and pictures that show the icon which also contains a question mark and a little icon that sort of looks like a computer chip.

When this happens, Lightroom has lost the connection between its database and the physical file that is your picture. In other words, Lightroom is expecting to see you pictures in a particular location, but the files are no longer there. Lightroom, not knowing what to do, will display the “?” indicating it is confused.

What is going on here? How did this happen, how do we prevent it from happening again and, most importantly, how do we fix it? Let’s look at all those questions.

What’s going on?

Most people have been used to using Adobe Bridge. Bridge is a “file browser”, you point it at a folder and it dutifully shows the contents of that folder. Lightroom does not quite work like that. To better understand how Lightroom works, think of your disk drive full of photos as being a large public library. Your pictures are the equivalent of books on shelves. The shelves would be equivalent to your folders and are labeled, just as your folders have names.

Now, in this environment, to find a book, you could walk the isles, looking for a shelf with the right label and when you find that, browse all the books on those shelves until you found the one you want. This would be the equivalent of opening Bridge, navigating to a folder of a particular name, opening that folder and browsing through all the photos until you find the one you want.

Another way of finding that book in the public library, is to go to the index, these days it is often a PC, and in the old days it would be a card system. You can search the index by title, by author, by publisher, by genre, etc. When you find the reference to the book you are looking for, the index will tell you what shelf that book is stored on.

This is exactly how Lightroom functions. The Lightroom Library Module is the equivalent of that in index. You look up your picture by keyword, or by camera, by date, etc and Lightroom knows where in your computer that photo is located.

So, now we can see what can go wrong. Imagine for a moment that someone in the public library wants to play a prank and moves books from one shelf to another shelf. You can imagine the havoc that can create when someone uses the index to find a book only to mystified when they cannot find the book on the designated shelf . . . because it is no longer there.

THIS is what has happened in your Lightroom setup when you see the two scenarios depicted in the screenshots at the start of this article! The images that Lightroom is referring to are no longer there. They have been moved. This typically happens when you go rearranging your folders within the Windows or Mac Finder environment. When you do that, you are the prankster that is confusing Lightroom. Usually, this happens when people purchase a new disk drive and move their folders full of picture onto that disk drive, believing that Lightroom will figure that out. Sadly, Lightroom is not that smart.

How to locate missing pictures and folders

Thankfully, there is a way of re-synchronizing Lightroom with your folders and images. You can do this on two levels: Individual pictures (one at a time) or whole folders (synchronizes all images in a folder in one hit). Which option you pick is up to you and depends somewhat on what you did when moving pictures. For example, if you moved a whole folder from your local drive to an external drive, you would re-sync using the “folder” option. If you moved a few individual images from one folder to another folder, you would choose the “individual picture” option.

Locating missing pictures

Make sure you are in the Library module. You should see thumbnails that display the icon representing missing images. As stated earlier, it looks like a little computer chip with a “?”.

Right-click the image that you want to re-locate and select the “Show in Explorer” Mac users will see “Show in Finder”.

This will bring up essentially an error message, but it offers the options to go locate the missing image. See the screenshot below.

Now click the “Locate” button and navigate to the new location where you put the file. Click “Choose” and Lightroom will be happy again.

Locate missing folders

If you moved a whole folder, don’t waste your time re-synching image-by-image as you can do this folder-by-folder which is much quicker.

This time we use the folder list, found on the left panel of the Library module. It will show a list of folders and the missing ones will be “grayed out” and will have that dreaded “?”. Simply right-click on the folder name you want to locate and select “Find Missing Folder”.

Now navigate to the new location you moved the folder to and select “choose”. Lightroom will ripple through the entire contents of that folder and re-synchronize its contents with its database, making everything work smoothly again. Do this for all missing folders.

That’s all there is to it!

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Few people realize that Lightroom can play an integral part in a tethered shooting workflow. In other words, you can connect your camera to your computer via a cable and have your shots immediately go to Lightroom rather than the camera’s memory card.

This setup can offer huge advantages. For starters, you can instantly see your shots on the large screen of the computer instead of the small LCD on the back of the camera, but it also saves time downloading images from your camera as the images are already in Lightroom.

So how do we do this?

Obviously, you first need a cable to connect your camera to your computer. You probably got one with the camera, it’s the same cable you use to download images from the camera. If you don’t have one, you can buy one from most computer and/or camera stores. Just check the connections in the computer (usually USB) and the camera (mini USB) and make sure you get one that is long enough for your setup.

You will need the software utility that “talks” to your camera. If you have Canon, that software is the EOS Utility which came for free with your camera. Unfortunately Nikon does not give their software away for free, you need to buy it. The software is called Nikon Camera Control Pro and you can get it at B&H for around $145. Here is the link

As I have a Canon, the following screenshots represents a Canon-specific setup.

In the Canon EOS Utility, you’ll need to identify the folder the EOS Utility will deposit the photos in. This is set up like in the screenshot below. I called this folder “incoming”.

Now we have completed the link between the computer and the camera.

Next is to setup Lightroom to watch this folder for incoming images. This is done in the Auto Import Settings under the FILE menu. First you need to “turn on” the Auto Import function, by selecting the first option, as seen here:

Then, you set it up in the Auto Import Settings . . . .

As you see below, I selected the “Incoming” folder as the folder to “watch”. That is exactly what Lightroom will do. It will sit there and monitor that folder waiting for anything to arrive. When you take a picture, the EOS Utility will save the picture into that folder where Lightroom will pick it up and process it, just like a normal IMPORT session.

The rest of the Auto Import Settings therefore look very similar to the normal Import settings. You specify a folder where you want Lightroom to put the image and you select the various other settings like presets and keywords.

Now you are all set!

Connect your camera to the computer, launch EOS Utility and Lightroom and shoot away. Every shot will be automatically imported into Lightroom.

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Backing up your photos is essential. In the digital world, there is no strip of negatives that you keep in a shoebox. If you have a single copy of your images, you are at risk of losing them. All it needs is a disk error and you may have lost all your precious images. Backing them up is the only safe way of ensuring you will not be heartbroken should something unforeseen happens to you PC.

Determining how you back up, how often and where to, will depend on several criteria such as amount of photos you have and budget.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Have you even noticed that when a preview first appears, it looks nice and bright, then suddenly changes to a more washed-out look? I bet you have and have wondered what’s going on.

Well, the image you first see appearing is the JPEG preview that is embedded in the Raw file. It is an image that was created by your camera. Canon users may have one of the PictureStyles selected which gets used when these JPEGs are created.

Canon Options

Upon import, Lightroom creates its own previews and because you have not done any post-pressing yet, the preview is built from the unadjusted Raw file, which will typically not be very bright or saturated so the Lightroom-generated previews will rarely look the same as the embedded JPEG.

Thankfully, Adobe has worked with the manufacturers and have created camera profiles that can be loaded into Lightroom and which closely match what the camera would do. These profiles, while still in beta, are an essential download in my opinion. Here is how they work and where to get them.

Here is how they work. And, by the way, they will only work with Lightroom 2 and ACR 4.5 or later.

They are “context sensitive”. In other words, they only appear when appropriate. So, if the EXIF data in the photo indicates the picture was taken with a Canon 5D, only the Canon 5D camera profiles will be displayed.

Here, on the left, you can see these profiles in the camera Calibration panel (Develop Module).

Canon users will immediately recognize them as being similar to the PictureStyle names. And that is precisely the intention of these camera profiles.

They aim to duplicate the manufacturer’s color appearance.

See the example below, where the top image is the untouched Raw file, while the one below that has the Landscape Profile assigned to it.

Not a huge difference, but definitely an improvement. You are now in a much better starting point to commence your post processing. It’s sort of like starting by setting your white balance.

Untouched Raw

With Canon "Landscape" Profile

The link to get these profiles from Adobe website is here: Get the profiles from Adobe

At the moment only Canon and Nikon camera profiles are provided.

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The Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom 2.1 release candidate is now available on Adobe Labs. The ‘release candidate’ label indicates that this update is well tested but would benefit from additional community testing before it is distributed automatically to all of Adobe’s customers.

The Lightroom team would like the community to help verify the quality of this update through normal usage as this will ensure that the application is tested on a diversity of hardware and software configurations not available internally at Adobe.

The release candidate is readily downloadable, but obviously only works if you have a valid V2 license key. By default, this Lightroom 2.1 release candidate will remove or overwrite your existing Lightroom 2.0 installation so caution is called for.

If you wish to return to Lightroom 2.0 after installing Lightroom 2.1, simply reinstall Lightroom 2.0 from your original download file or from the CD after performing the following:

• Mac: Delete this file before reinstalling Lightroom 2.0: Library/Receipts/Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.pkg.
• Windows: Uninstall Lightroom 2.1 using the Windows add/remove program utility.

Both versions of the application share the same catalog format allowing your catalogs to be opened by either version without complications.

Go to the Adobe Lightroom 2.1 page

What’s New?

Support was added for some new cameras, notably the Fuji Finepix IS Pro, Nikon D700, Nikon D90 and the Nikon Coolpix P6000.

For the rest, the release mainly dealt with addressing some stability issues and performance bugs. The “Edit in Photoshop” bug was addressed too. For a full list, see the Adobe page found by following the link above.

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One of Lightroom’s great productivity features is the ability to save your post processing work as a preset, allowing you to use the same settings time and time again on different photos.

However, over time, as you collect more and more presets, your preset panel can grow to unmanageable proportions. Time to get organized by creating preset folders into which you can organize your own presets or import presets downloaded from the Internet. Read the rest of this entry »

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Did you know that Adobe’s Lightroom has an “Auto Sync” function? It is well hidden, so don’t feel bad if you didn’t know about it.
So what does it do? Let’s find out.

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When Lightroom first came out, there was a lot of discussion in online forums about the need for importing your photos. Many people argued that it was unnecessary. They wanted to browse their folders, just like they were used to before Lightroom. As a result, many people did not change their filing system after they installed Lightroom, and, even today, first import their photos into a folder, then import them into Lightroom.

Let’s take a look at how efficient this this.

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