Help I screwed up using synch in the Develop module

[cal]

Lightroom Version Number

11.4

Operating System

1. macOS 12 Monterey

I just finished editing about 150 photos in a folder in Lightroom - many hours. I was taking one last review to sharpen and do one last pass through to delete redundancies. I had all photos selected and chose sync for the sharpening. I forgot to uncheck synch went to delete a photo and unintentionally deleted every single one of them. I've done nothing since. Is there any way to undo this disaster? I am working on a Macbook Pro with the most current version of LIghtroom Classic.

 

[Califdan]

There may not be many options.

If LrC has not been quit since the delete, you may try the undo command but as I recall it does not work on deletes. However, your profile says you are a Beginner, so perhaps you actaully did a remove rather than a delete and it is possible that the undo will work (I don't recall if this is the case but worth a try). If you've quit LrC since the problem occured this option can't work. I don't have LrC running right now (started system backups before I head off to bed) so can't test the idea.

As you are on a Mac, it is possible that Time Machine captured a copy of your catalog shortly before the delete that you could revert to (assuming you are running Time machine). If that works, you may have to recover your image files from the Trash or some backup but that should not be too difficult as they seem to all be in the same folder.

If there is no joy from the two options above, and your "many hours" of editing spanned a shutdown of Lrc where you choose to perfomr a backup when prompted by lightroom as part of the shut down, you can restore that backup. Again, you may also need to recover deleted image files from the Trash and of cousse you'd lose any updates you did since that backup.

One last thought depends on if you had Auto Save of Metadata turned on. If so you let us know.

 

[cal]

The Undo or Command Z does not work in this situation even when LrC has not been shutdown. I Fortunately the .nef and .xmp files were in the trash I copied them with finder into a folder on my hard drive and then imported the first few and much to my delight all of the edits were saved with the files. The only thing I lost was the history listing of each of the edits but I can always make any additional edits as the develop panel has the results of all of the edits. This morning I 'added' all of the images into the catalog and moved the recovered folder to where I want it using the LrC Library module. It was so satisfying to watch the previews being built after import and seeing each thumbnail one by one reflect all of the edits. I think what saved me was the catalog preference setting for metadata to 'automatically write changes to xmp'
Using the Autosync feature can be a great time saver but it can also be very risky if not turned off immediately after desired changes are applied - this is the mistake I made along with not paying close attention to dialog boxes when they pop up and not backing up my work more frequently rather then after many hours of work.