Synchronizing the catalog and image...

I'm a relatively new user of Lightroom 2 (a few months). Mostly I've been adding metadata and making minor adjustments so far.

I have image folders on my laptop and an external drive, mostly organized by year. They go back to 2000. In my first years of digital imaging, I either renamed or resaved the jpg (not knowing at the time about the lossiness), so in some cases I'm not sure which are the originals.

Anyway, the year folders are not all organized quite the same way, and I want to put all the originals in a subfolder under the year, or make separate year folders for the non-originals. I've already imported most of the photos when I first got Lightroom.

Questions:

1) Is there an easy way to tell which photos in my year folders have not been cataloged (besides trying to catalog and waiting for it to tell me that some are already there)?

2) If I move things around within the year folders outside of Lightroom, would I need to re-catalog, or is there a way to synch/resynch? And what happens to the already-cataloged items that were moved?

3) Is there a way to take multiple folders and catalog everything in them at once? Unless I'm missing something, I have to select a single folder and highlight all the individual files I want to catalog.

4) If I applied metadata originally in Bridge, then deleted the image in Lightroom (perhaps inadvertently), do I lose the metadata?

Thanks.

Synchronizing the catalog and image...

A) Not without doing a lot of manual comparsion by looking at the files in Finder/Explorer and comparing to the catalog. It would probably be quicker to use Synchronize Folder and looking at the suggested import previews.

b) Lightroom will display the files as missing. Clicking on the ? on the thumbnail will bring up the locate file dialog. Using 'Find Nearby Photos' will find the rest of that folder.

c)You can select a folder. Lightroom will let you browse the subfolders in the Import dialog. With Show Previews enabled, you can pick and choose what to import. You can only add one metadata preset to all though, so it might be worth waiting to apply this when the import is done.

d) If the image is removed from the catalog, Lightroom will forget the metadata unless it had been saved to XMP also. Both Camera Raw and Lightroom can read this. With Tiff, Jpeg, DNG, PSD, this XMP info is embedded, but with Raw it exists as a sidecar file.

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