I migrated all files and apps from an older Mac to a new M4 computer.
Now I get the ?s only in keyword searches. The original folders are normal.
Notice the blank files are duplicates.
They can be eliminated by a slow process of Reveal Image In Finder then go back and fix Image Path on the blank but that is not practical .
Is there an updated fix for this?
Did you copy over the database? Is the image file folder structure on the new computer identical to the old one? Did you copy over all the sidecar files exactly as they appeared on your previous machine?
Mark
It was accomplished with the Migration Assistant. The source was a backup OS on an SSD. So it was all automated.
I can’t explain the black images with a quote. It should be either noting or an image wit a quote.
Check the locations of the images, I mean the new and the old ones.
George
@Tom I am a Windows user and there are differences between DxPL on the Mac and on Windows but I believe that on both systems the presence or absence of a directory, as far as DxPL is concerned; is based not on the drive name, e.g. D:\ etc, but on the drive identifier.
This is shown as the UniqueId in the following snapshot of the ‘Folders’ structure (there are structure name and field name differences between Mac and Windows but they are fairly similar in structure)
It is that field that DxPL uses to locate (or not) any existing entries in the database, if there is no match then DxPL will add that folder to ‘Folders’ and start discovering the images as if it has never seen them before.
If all your old files now reside on a drive with a different identifier than when you first discovered them in DxPL, then those old discoveries will remain in the database and DxPL will discover them “afresh” when you look at the folders on the new drive and create new entries!
My guess is that the images that you can see “correctly” are the new images and the old images are showing as Black with a question mark, not the other way around!
So a little test with 3 directories named Ben, Bill and Little Weed (look up “The FlowerPot Men” fir information on this “ancient” children’s TV program!
Each has the same 4 images and are assigned keywords relating to their location (“Ben”, “Bill” and “Little Weed”). Each group of four are also assigned to a Project, named, you guessed it already.
So we have
While PL8 is occupied with another directory two images were deleted from Ben, 2 from Bill and all from Little Weed using file manager but the search function is based on the state of the database and searches immediately yield the following
Following the Projects links yield this
and the re-discovery and searches yield this
I have recreated the symptoms of the problem not the exact cause but on Windows and Mac the ‘Projects’ will be useless because the pointers are to database entries that no longer have “real” entries available and the same thing happens with searches because they discover the new entries but also the old ones!
PS:- I might be wrong because your “missing” is black with a question mark and mine also have an exclamation mark and the symbol to identify that the camera/lens combination is unknown!?
Thanks for looking into this.
I use a couple of keyword searches that take me to one folder.
To solve the issue for those conditions I do the following:
Click an image to Reveal In Finder.
Click on the duplicate blank to Fix Image Path.
Select the same image that I found in Finder.
This eliminates all the blanks in that folder/search.
But when the keyword search includes images in many folders, this solution is impractical .
You can try this (but it’s a workaround and therefore not without caveats), provided you have sidecar files for each image file:
Now, the black/? search results should be gone.
Please test thoroughly before putting a lot of effort into new images. You might lose that effort when you have to fall back to your latest database backup.
As of now, there is no feature that finds duplicate entries reliably. DxO could remedy that situation with more database maintenance (sanity) functionality. This has been requested and hanging in the response-less void for a few years now.
Alternative: Just re-index the old and new photo archives. There are two archives and they might deserve being seen ( 
)
Thanks for the suggestion.
