Today’s Question: In the new Assisted Culling feature in Lightroom Classic, there are new categories under the Catalog heading, one which is Missing Photographs. All of those listed as “Missing” in this new section (nearly 150,000) in my catalog are at known locations easily found and have no “?” appearing on the image frame in Library. Can you explain what is this category of Missing Photographs intended to identify?
Tim’s Quick Answer: The “Missing Photographs” collection isn’t new, but there appear to be some issues that cause the exclamation point to not appear for some photos when the Assisted Culling feature has been used.
More Detail: The “Missing Photographs” collection in the Catalog section of the left panel in the Library module in Lightroom Classic will only appear if the Photo > Find All Missing Photos command has been used. It is not a new feature of Lightroom Classic 15.
Based on my testing, when photos appear in the Missing Photographs collection, they are indeed missing, meaning they can’t be found in the expected folder with the expected filename. However, there appear to be one or more bugs in the new update to Lightroom Classic that cause the exclamation point icons to not show up reliably. This appears to be related to the use of the Assisted Culling Feature.
When you enable Assisted Culling, photos get marked with a green circle with a checkmark if they are identified as Selects, and a red circle with an “X” if they are identified as Rejects. This icon appears in the same location that the exclamation point for a missing photo would appear, causing the exclamation point to not appear for missing photos that also have been marked by the Assisted Culling feature.
Furthermore, my testing shows that even if you turn off the Assisted Culling criteria so that the Select and Reject icons are hidden, the exclamation point icon for missing photos still doesn’t appear. However, you would still see the “Photos is missing” message below the Histogram on the right panel in the Library module.
So, I think it is safe to say that if a photo appears in the Missing Photographs collection in the Catalog section, the source image file truly can’t be found by Lightroom Classic. You just might not see the corresponding exclamation point icon with the image thumbnail due to an apparent bug in Lightroom Classic related to the new Assisted Culling feature.
