How can I tell which catalog a missing image belongs to?

Question

How can I tell which catalog a missing image belongs to?
Beating a dead horse.....Everytime I need "missing images" in LR4.2, I cannot access them, even though I am looking right at the location they presntly occupy because thye image is ALREADY IN ANOTHER CATALOG.
HOW frustrating is this...going on 8 months now. But I need the images and I suppose I could just go back and reprocess 10,000 images that are missing in my collections but I have tried many solutions offered over the months that are just impractical.
So Now I want to approach this thing from the other direction...
If let's say one image is already associated with another catalog that houses that collection, ( and the collection is important because it has the edits), i want to go to that catalog instead.
How do I do this?
Any Ideas?

Answer 1

So Now I want to approach this thing from the other direction...
If let's say one image is already associated with another catalog that houses that collection, ( and the collection is important because it has the edits), i want to go to that catalog instead.
How do I do this?
It sounds as if you have been using separate catalogs for sets of images which are in separate folders. Perhaps you have had good reason to do that. But I would now make three linked observations:
It seems that you are now more able to both find, and distinguish, things via a folder structure - rather than via whatever classification of different catalogs you may have thought were going to be helpful to you
accordingly, having these mutiple catalogs is now getting in your way
using folders works just the same inside one big catalog, as it does inside each of two smaller catalogs.
The solution to the first two, IMO, is to merge your separate catalogs into one catalog. Then the third will kick in. You can still keep the current separate catalogs for archive or reference purposes, but the "Import from Another Catalog" function will MERGE copies of all their contents into a combined, larger catalog that you can use going forward. (The images and folders themselves, do not change in any way when you do this.)
If you wish to track which catalog each image is currently inside, you could apply some kind of keyword across all images in that catalog, before carrying out the merge. However, it sounds to me as if your folder arrangement currently mirrors the different catalogs in some way anyway - and will continue to convey the same information once combined.
Lightroom is designed to be able to work with large numbers of images more or less the same as with small numbers; and this has been anecdotally confirmed in many cases. AFAICT the main performance  issue is not  the size of the database, but the size and nature of the image data involved and the complexity of things you do with that, per image, also the ability of your computer system to carry these operations out, per image. (Another overall productivity issue is: do you need to keep navigating to and opening different catalogs; or... not!)
Even if you merge catalogs and then change your mind about all or some of that, you can either: retain and go back to the previous un-merged catalogs - or: to preserve further work done since merging, you can use Export as Catalog to copy out a certain highlighted set of images. Then you can Remove what you wish from the main catalog - using the exact same means of identifying which images require this - for example, the image set you have only just exported to a new catalog will still be highlighted inside the source catalog.
RP