Lightroom Missing photos

I have Lightroom 3 and Photshop CS5 on my iMac.  Suddenly Lightroom tells me that certain photos - held in the 'All Photographs' folder are either missing of offline (5247 of them).  I can open them in Photoshop, I can open them in Finder, but as soon as I go to Develop in Lightroom I am told they are missing.  Can anyone help, please?

Diana,
Lightroom only keeps pointers to the photos. If you use some program outside of Lightroom (like Finder) to move your folders or images to a different place on your Mac, Lightroom loses track of where they are. You can tell Lightroom where to look, and all will be well.
Look at your Folder view in Lightroom. Do the folder lines have a "?" on them? If so, right-click on the highest-level folder and choose Find Missing Folder...  Navigate to where that folder now is, and select that location. That folder and all of its sub-folders will be thereby reconnected to Lightroom.
Hal

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