Question / Help request

Question

I have recently moved all my RAW files onto my external hard drive and deleted them from my computer where I kept them before. This meant re-importing files into Lightroom again but I got a nasy surprise that not a single edit I did to those pictures / files was actually saved onto the file. View NX which I got with the camera saved all the changes automatically onto the RAW file (or at least asked you if you wanted to save the changes before moving on) which means that all edits I did before on there are fine but not a single Lightroom edit was kept.
I will assume I did something wrong and being new to this software I didn't save the changes somehow. I would appreciate if someone could tell me if there is a way to restore those edits which I seem to have lost or at least how do I stop this from happening again and by that I mean how do I make sure that edits are actually saved onto the RAW file as opposed to "do it again after you copy the image" sort of situation.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

David,
From your questions I gather that, indeed, you have to learn some basic things about Lr. Without knowing these things one comes to grief. I'm not condescending, but ... been there, done that ...
I try to answer your questions without going to deep into the matter:
Lr saves everything that you do in its data base, called the "catalog". In Lr speak "catalog" always refers to this data base, not to images. The saving to catalog is automatically done; you don't have to hit <Save>.
This catalog is a file that is different from and stored in a separate place than your image files. Since the catalog contains all your edits it becomes as important as your image files. Hence the strong recommendation to always (meaning after each Lr session) make a backup of the catalog.
In addition to the catalog there is an option of "saving to file" (which should be read as "saving to image file"). This "saving to file" does not replace saving to catalog, it is an additional saving. You can set Lr to do this automatically by enabling <Automatically save changes to xmp>, or you can do it manually (for individual images or for a group of selected images) by going >Metadata >Save metadata to file - or shortcut Ctr. / Cmd. + S (letter S on keyboard).
Among all the other things Lr stores in its catalog also the names and location of your image files and folders. When either of these is changed outside of Lr (in your OS) you get question marks besides the folders and on the frame of images (in Grid View). This is the indication that Lr has lost the connection to your images / folders and does not "know" where they are. When this happens, the right procedure is to re-connect Lr to the correct location of images / folders.
So, when you move images or image folders, or you rename images or folders, or you change the folder structure - and if you do this outside of Lr - you have to re-connect Lr with the new location.
When a folder shows the question mark, right-click it and select <Find missing folder>, then navigate to the correct location of the folder and click on it. The same procedure applies when you change the folder name outside of Lr: Lr will show the folder under its old name with a question mark, so you do the <Find missing folder> procedure.
When only individual images are missing, you left-click the question mark on the frame of the image (in Grid View)  and select <Locate>, then navigate to the correct location and click on it. Same procedure when you changed the name of an image file. When you click on the re-named file you will be asked to confirm that this is the correct file.
This would have been the correct procedure after you moved your images to the external drive.
But you can avoid all this, when you just do all of your image management in Lr. Drag-and-drop folders or images to a different location - in the folders panel. Rename folders or image files in Lr - right-click and select <Rename>. When you do these things in Lr, it will keep track of the changes.
The background of all this is, that Lr is not a browser based program, i.e. Lr does not automatically "see" what is on the hard drive. So changes done outside of Lr are not automatically "seen" or "recognized" by Lr.
I recommend that you watch some of the video tutorials on Adobe's website. They are excellent, and different from books insofar as you will see on your monitor what the instructor does, where he points the mouse, where he clicks, etc.
http://tv.adobe.com/product/lightroom/
http://tv.adobe.com/show/adobe-evangelists-julieanne-kost/
http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-lightroom-3/
Also Victoria Bramptons website is very good: http://www.lightroomqueen.com/   She also wrote a book.
Martin Evening's book on Lr has also been recommended on this forum by various posters. I don't recall the exact title.