Lightroom deleted thousands of photos and any edits I made in the month of April

[blythesummers]

Lightroom Version

v11

Operating System

1. Windows 10

Hi if anyone has any solutions that would be great. All original RAW files are luckily backed up on a hard drive, but I lost every single edit I made. None of the photos are even in the lightroom catalog. I have been using lightroom for years and never had this issue. Every thing from March is completely fine. It is just April, not even sure how this could happen. Multiple downloads are just completely missing. If anyone has any solution besides redownloading them into Lightroom and starting over I would appreciate it!

 

[Hal P Anderson]

It sounds like you opened an earlier catalogue, but it's hard to tell from here. How do your backups look?

 

[blythesummers]

Just checked and it is my most recent catalogue that is missing the images. Currently downloading all my backup files. they are exactly as the original files were, but still missing all my edits.

 

[Johan Elzenga]

Just checked and it is my most recent catalogue that is missing the images. Currently downloading all my backup files. they are exactly as the original files were, but still missing all my edits.

How did you check that? If Lightroom opens a catalog, it will change the modification date of that catalog, even if you don’t do anything but open and close it.

If you import backup files, they will indeed be imported without edits. That is because edits are saved in the catalog, not in the files.

 

[johnbeardy]

File > Open Recent will list catalogues that you've opened. So open each in turn, until you find the one which records the edits.

As noted, Explorer's File Modified time is misleading for LR. It simply records when the catalogue was opened, not the most recent changes.

 

[MrFixit]

I set the LrC Catalog to save .XMP sidecar files. Whilst not perfect, most of your edits are saved in these files. So with a delete of an image file followed by a re-import your edits are (generally) restored from the sidecar file to the LrC Catalog (I think masks may be missing though). It's useful (and I back these up with my image files) and can get you out of a bind sometimes. I also save the Catalog every time LrC closes (checking it's Integrity) to another drive.

 

[Gnits]

File > Open Recent will list catalogues that you've opened. So open each in turn, until you find the one which records the edits.

As noted, Explorer's File Modified time is misleading for LR. It simply records when the catalogue was opened, not the most recent changes.

Very good idea....