fresh install or Lr. All images were saved on an external question

[SloYerRoll]

I have a friend that totally nuked his machine w/a nasty virus. He did ia factory install of the entire OS and has Lr back up and running.

He saved all his images to an external drive that he brought over and I scanned to make sure it wasn't bad. fortunately it's not.

What we're trying to figure out is how to get Lr to "see" all his images and the edits, keywords etc. that go with it.

I have access to all the Lr backups and stuff. But I don't have a clue what to do w/ it. I could probably bumble around and figure it out. But why not go to the pros first! :cheesy:

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Best,

 

[SloYerRoll]

I guess it wouldn't hurt to add that all these images were saved to Lr so all the sidecar info is in there as well.

All I need to do is figure out how to point the fresh install of data to the old Lr pictures.

 

[Andrew Hayton]

Jon,

If you have a backup file from the catalogue, you should be able to open it and all should be well, or at least to the point when the backup was made and that the images are still in the same place. Once the files are in you can then synchronize the folder to find any later files that aren't in the library catalogue. It can be cases like this that you realize how important saving the meta data to teh files or sidecar files is and having a backup of the library.

Let us know how it goes.

 

[SloYerRoll]

Thanks for the reply Andrew. Now that that is up and running.

He wants for his images to sit on his "C" drive instead of the the "F" drive that its sitting on now. So here are some details:
The same exact images are in two locations:
1. On the "F" drive where they used to live (and still do now)
2. The "C" drive under the Pictures folder. (I manually copied them over after he asked to change the images place of residence.

So what I'd like to do is have Lr recognize the images on the "C" drive. Right now, when I right click, "View in Explorer" it points me to the images on the "F" drive.

Is there a semi painless way to do this w/o manually changing all the folders? If it's manual, he's on his own:lol:

I am going to wipe his external HD and use it as a data backup so he has a little more redundancy in his life. This catastrophe really spooked him into reality.

 

[Andrew Hayton]

I would have used LR to move the files rather than manually copying them to the new drive but as you have I would disconnect the F drive without LR running. Now start LR and open the last backup file. LR will show that the F drive or folders on it are missing (in red) Now you need to select the top level folder and ask LR to find the original and select the C drives folder. Hopefully LR will see the rest and automatically link to them. Do not erase the F drive until you are sure that all files have been linked properly.

 

[SloYerRoll]

I would have used LR to move the files rather than manually copying them to the new drive but as you have I would disconnect the F drive without LR running. Now start LR and open the last backup file. LR will show that the F drive or folders on it are missing (in red) Now you need to select the top level folder and ask LR to find the original and select the C drives folder. Hopefully LR will see the rest and automatically link to them. Do not erase the F drive until you are sure that all files have been linked properly.

Thanks Andrew. I still have the option of using Lr to move the images. I can jsut delete the "C" drive images and do it via Lr.
While I'm good in the develop module, I'm a bit lacking in the others and asset management:|

Thanks again.