Lightroom lost images in BL web galleries

Backlight 4, 5 & 6 Support
#1

Hi…

I have not needed to make any changes to my website in many months, but when I opened LR today and looked at my website collections under Publish Services > TTG Publisher, I noticed that while the galleries are still there, most of the images within most of the galleries are gone. The files are still on my hard drive and available elsewhere in LR, and my site works just fine since I have not published the site or any changes for a long time. I am completely mystified by this–LR and BL have worked perfectly together since day-one. This is clearly a LR problem.

I could use some advice on how to deal with this issue. I prefer not to rebuild all of the galleries in LR because the images are spread all over my LR folders and collections, so I am thinking I can use the BL Publisher going forward. For each album, I can go to edit > Advanced Settings and change Managed by Lightroom to Managed by Backlight. At that point, all website gallery management will be within BL and I can simply delete BL from my LR Publisher Services. Does this sound like the best solution? (Note that I loaded my earliest saved LR backup and the problem had happened before that.)

I am using Backlight 5 and the latest version of LR Classic for Windows.

Thanks for any thoughts and advice.

John

HELP! Images disappear in PUBLISHER module
#2

You could try clearing Lightroom’s Preferences file; that can often fix weird problems in Lightroom:

#3

Thanks, Rod.

Resetting the LR Prefs didn’t work, but it was worth a try. I think my best option is to set each album in BL to “Managed by Backlight” and work in BL from now on. Do you agree?

#4

Well, it’s a great way to protect your website from whatever catalog corruption in Lightroom, yes.

You should do whatever integrity checks you are able to do on your catalog. Check any syncing or smart albums settings that might in play.

A quick Googling brought up several links to similar images. This is a good one; might be a good place to gather some insight:

#5

Thank you, Matt.

I don’t use LR Smart Collections (other than the default ones that I never look at) and the integrity check didn’t help. What’s so odd is that the only LR collections that were effected were the ones in my TTG Publisher collections. Weird. In any case, I’m very glad that BL’s Publisher shows all of the images, so I will unlink the albums from LR and work in BL going forward. (One more reason to love BL!)

2 Likes
#6

I have not yet solved the problem of images vanishing from my BL collections/galleries in LR. At first, I thought the actual image files were deleted from my hard drives, but that was not the case. Imported folders and files, along with most of the LR TTG Publisher Services collections lost files. Note that the colledtions remained, just the images vanished from the collections. No explanation so far.

Going forward, I will use the BL Publisher. HOWEVER, I am having a problem with that. I am trying to change the Album Management setting from Managed by Lightroom to Managed by Backlight. I make the selection in the dropdown box and click Save, but nothing happens. The Save button doesn’t change when clicked, and the Base Settings > Photo order still shows Lightroom. How to fix this?

Thanks for any help.

#7

Per my previoius post, I was not able to change the BL setting for Album Management from LR to BL, so I decided to stay with LR and I went through the trouble of rebuilding my BL collections/albums in LR Publisher. It took a few hiours, but I’m back to where I started and it’s all working well again. Why those LR publisher collections/albums lost all of those images remains a mystery.

#8

Hi @John_Blaustein, regarding being unable to change an album from managed by Lightroom to managed by Backlight, would you be able to provide me with a Backlight admin login so that I can try to work out what’s going wrong? The best way would be by clicking on my profile name followed by ‘Message’.