missing pictures from back up

[karenw217]

I've seen this topic, and I'm afraid I know the answer, but I'm going to ask anyway to see if I'm going to have a lucky day.

I have many back up catalogs on an external hard drive. Silly me, I thought that was a back up of my images. My computer's hard drive crashed recently and now I'm trying to retrieve my images from the last year off my "backed-up" catalogs but I get gray blocks with image # but it says they are missing.
No data was able to be retrieved off my crashed hard drive, so these back ups are it. Is there anyway to get the images?
Thanks in advance, Karen

 

[b_gossweiler]

Karen,

Welcome to the forum, and sorry to hear that happened to you.

Unfortunately, the LR catalog backup only backs up the catalog itself, and neither the images themselfs nor the previews of the cataloged images.

So I'm sorry to tell you, but your backup catalogs won't help you in any way to retrieve your images.

If you still have a working folder with the last catalog you were working on (not the backup), there are ways to retrieve the previews from the ...Previews.lrdata folder. Of course the previews are - quality wise - not what your original images were (also depending on the preview size available), but maybe better than nothing.

One tool that does export previews is LRViewer, and there is also a LR Plugin from Jeffrey Friedl available to export previews from a catalog.

Let's hope somebody else here can give you an answer you like more :

Beat

 

[Brad Snyder]

Karen, welcome. I'm afraid Beat's correct. Having just the *.lrcat backup catalog file is not enough in this instance. You'd also need either the original image files (an oxymoron, because then your problem is already solved) or the *.lrdata folder, holding the preview cache.

Lr's backup procedure is intended to provide safety for Lr problems, that is, catalog corruption. Rightly or wrongly, it's assumed that you're backing up your image files with your own system backup procedures.

You have sympathy from all of us here, but based on your description, I believe your images may be lost.