NEF in Lightroom

I have a Nikon D800 and take photos in RAW and jpeg.
I have lightroom and photoshop. These have both been updated to the latest versions. Eg. Camera Raw Plug in 8.8 Lightroom version 5.7.
When I try to import to Lightroom, a message comes up and says “preview unavailable for this file.
When I go to Import, I get a message that says “The file is not recognised by the raw format support in Lightroom. (1) Then it says check for updates. When I check for updates it says “Your software is up to date. No updates are available at this time.
For some reason, my version of lightroom doesn’t allow me to import NEF files even though I am fully updated.

That's actually typical. jpeg files are usually not damaged by the utility. The other software in general doesn't actually show you the raw file, but it shows the jpeg embedded in the raw, so you don't see the corruption in the raw data that is actually present. You should download the files using the software built in to your operating system or directly using Lightroom from the card. You can also update your Nikon Transfer to the latest version and download with that but that perpetuates the problem to when you update your camera again so you are usually better off not using Nikon's software to transfer files at all as it is known to alter the nef files in ways that outside software cannot read the raw data anymore. If you already deleted the files from your memory cards, you can try to fix the files using the utility available here: Fix Corrupted Nikon NEF Images as you are not the first to run into this problem.

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