Restoring removed photos

[Flickrbug]

New to Lightroom, using LR3 beta, so apologies up front for my ignorance! I inadvertently had all my photos in the catalog selected when removing a photo from the catalog - the long & short of it is the catalog is now empty. Is there a way to restore these photos to the catalog with all the editing in place (I just spent a week processing 15' pics. No, I didn't back up the catalog!). Please help!!

 

[dj_paige]

If you haven't closed Lightroom, Ctrl-Z (Undo) should work.

If you have closed Lightroom, the answer depends on whether or not you have saved the edits to the xmp. You can either do this manually on each photo (Ctrl-S), or turn on the global option. Did you do that? If so, you can retrieve your files and edits from the recycle bin. If not, then your photos are there, but none of your edits.

By the way, you do know that you shouldn't be using Lightroom3 Beta for actual real work, don't you?

 

[clee01l]

[quote author=dj_paige link=topic=8698.msg586'6#msg586'6 date=1261492664]
If you haven't closed Lightroom, Ctrl-Z (Undo) should work.

If you have closed Lightroom, the answer depends [/quote]
One other option is the catalog backup. LR3 wants to do a catlog backup on close. You should have several backups. If you did backup on close, the last one will not contain your removed images, but the one before that will.

 

[Flickrbug]

Thanks guys - point taken. 1) I should have backed up the catalog. 2) I should've saved the edits to XMP files. 3) I shouldn't have used the beta for serious work! But, in my defence: I selected all the photos in the catalog to unflag all of them. I then selected one photo to delete it. At this point LR should have unselected all of the previously selected photos and only selected my last choice. On the prompt I belive LR should include something like "Are you sure you wish to delete ALL of the photos in this catalog?" - a few simple lines of extra code. I also believe that all of the editing data is still retained in the database, and it should be a simple matter of re-importing the original photos and linking them to the edits.
Thanks for the input.

 

[clee01l]

[quote author=Flickrbug link=topic=8698.msg58649#msg58649 date=1261549212]..."Are you sure you wish to delete ALL of the photos in this catalog?" - a few simple lines of extra code. I also believe that all of the editing data is still retained in the database, and it should be a simple matter of re-importing the original photos and linking them to the edits.
Thanks for the input.
[/quote]There is a dialog window that pops up stating "Delete XX selected master photos from disk or remove them from lightroom"
You are wrong in your belief that all the editing data is still retained in the data base. That's not how databases work. There are several tables in the database and each one related to the other by a Unique Key field. In the LR database, the key field is one that will uniquely identify the image. The key not only ties the metadata to the image file location , it also is a pointer to the edit history. When you pressed the <Remove> button, you gave the database instructions to drop all records in all tables where the key was the unique identifier for the images selected. When its gone, its gone!

There is another discussion on the forum that is currently discussing the merits of whether to back up the XMP sidecard files. There are those of us that have committed stupid user tricks in the past and also experienced catastrophic HD failures that will take a very conservative approach to back-ups. In short, you can never have too many.

Consider that you have now learned a lesson early when it was not too expensive (only 15' files) . It could have been worse in that you could have chosen <Delete from Disk>