Manyphotos

Question

I would like to check and eliminate duplicate photos in my lightroom storage file. However when I click on the file, I don't see separate pictures, it at best reopens Lightroom to show all pictures. Before lightroom the photos all separately could be clicked on and opened up and I could use a program to identify any duplicates, now in the Lightroom file system it seems like I can't click on them separately and bring only the one up. I liked the capability to open explorer and find one photo is I wished. Is there a way in Lightroom photo storage file to show all photos without opening up Lightroom?

Answer 1

How can you direct the "real" picture to a certain file?
You seem to be using "file" and "folder" interchangeably. I presume you mean you want the picture to go to a certain folder.
In that case, you can drag the photo and drop it on top of the desired folder in the Folder Panel, all of thi is done inside of Lightroom. Alternatively, on import you can specify (on the right) the directory where the folder goes.
Also, now I have photos in many different folders in my C drive and would really like to get them into one main folder so I can also save a duplicate file on my external hard drive. How can I do that and not have themy come up "missing" when I open Lightroom? I have over 20,000 photos from many years of travel.
The above procedure also works with folders, you drag and drop within Lightroom. I would recommend a different approach, however, I would get a dedicated third pary backup program that can back up your entire hard disk (or specified portions of it); this is much less work than moving folders from here to there, and also can automatically make backups at a regular interval.
I always thought that if I had my main Lightroom file on my C drive and a backup on external hard drive, I was pretty safe, but what I hear you saying is that say all my photos were just on my C drive and it became corrupted, the lightroom backup would not be worth anything because it goes elsewhere (in this case only the C drive) to get the photos. Make any sense?
No.
If something happens to your C: drive, then you simply move the backup photos from wherever they are to their original locations on your C: drive, and you are ready to go. Again, a dedicated backup program will make this very simple and automatic for you, so you don't even have to know what the original locations were.
But if you're going to do this manually, be sure to make a backup of all of your photos, your catalog file, and any presets you might have.