ket watters wrote:
Photoshop 10 suddenly has flagged all of my photos as "offline". They have not moved from my J drive. Catalog manager shows the catalog as being on the J drive. However, individual photo properties now show them on the F drive. I have not moved anything. I don't even have an F drive. How do I get Photoshop to understand that the photos are still on the J drive?
I am trying to understand the situation:
- your media files are on an external J drive. When you are looking at the file properties in the organizer, or when you look at the 'Folders' trees, they are now appearing as being in the 'F' drive. You have never used a 'F' drive.
- You have verified that the Windows Explorer shows the "J" drive correctly with all your pictures.
- Those media files are now shown as being 'offline' (not disconnected) in the organizer.
- If you look at the location of the catalog : menu Help / System info, the catalog is shown as being on the "J" drive. That means your catalog is not in the default location on your "C" drive, but that you have chosen to store it on the external drive. The location of the catalog is independent from the location of the pictures. The organizer can open the catalog, no error there.
So, the problem is that for an unknown reason the drive identification for each file in the database is wrong. From your post, I gather that all your media pictures are on the same external drive.
In the database (catalog.pse10db), each media file record shows the full path and the drive identification. That drive identification is a numeric field. There is volume_table table describing what that numeric data stands for, especially drive letter and internal serial number of the drive. If for some reason the record for that internal numeric field has been changed to show the drive letter or serial number of the "F" drive, all your media files are supposed to be on the "F" drive.
Without further investigation in the database, and without any obvious reason of the drive identification change, I would suggest the following test on a copy of your catalog (not to take any risk).
- Locate your catalog folder (menu Help / System Info)
- copy it in another location on your C: drive
- Temporarily set Windows to assign the 'F' drive letter to your external drive : 3 Ways to Assign a Drive Letter - wikiHow
- to open the organizer with the new catalog copy, double click on the catalog.pse10db file in the catalog folder
With some luck, that would get all your files as no longer offline.
What would be the result of the above test ?