I have many images in my Pictures folder (60k+). They are organized as such:
Pictures
/2010
/2011
/2012
/03-05 - New York
/04-07 - Park
/06-08 - Birthday
When I import these pictures into Lightroom for the first time. it only imports some of it. Maybe 20k? I right click on the root folder ("Pictures") and click "synchronize". It finds a few thousand new photos each time. And yes, I have disabled the "don't import suspected duplicates" option.
Anyways, after I repeat this process 3-4 times, it stops working. Then I have to click on each individual subfolder (e.g. "New York" or "Birthday") and click synchronize.
This is why time consuming, and many pictures are often missing from the catelog. Why is this happening?
I am using OS X 10.9.4 with Lightroom 5.6. My pictures are stored on a Windows SMB share. 60k pictures total about 1.4TB