• Welcome to the Lightroom Queen Forums! We're a friendly bunch, so please feel free to register and join in the conversation. If you're not familiar with forums, you'll find step by step instructions on how to post your first thread under Help at the bottom of the page. You're also welcome to download our free Lightroom Quick Start eBooks and explore our other FAQ resources.
  • Stop struggling with Lightroom! There's no need to spend hours hunting for the answers to your Lightroom Classic questions. All the information you need is in Adobe Lightroom Classic - The Missing FAQ!

    To help you get started, there's a series of easy tutorials to guide you through a simple workflow. As you grow in confidence, the book switches to a conversational FAQ format, so you can quickly find answers to advanced questions. And better still, the eBooks are updated for every release, so it's always up to date.

Undelete photo

Status
Not open for further replies.
A

adonetok

Member
Joined
Aug 29, 2020
Messages
78
Lightroom Version Number
9.3
Operating System
  1. Windows 10
In develop module, I hit "X" to mark photos which are going to delete.
Is it possible to restore photos which were deleted?
 
Sort by date Sort by votes
It depends upon what you did next. Usually this "x" only marks the image as "rejected" and it stays in the catalog with a "rejected" flag. If you did further processes to delete rejected photos, you get a dialog asking whether you wanted to simply remove the image from the catalog OR remove from the catalog AND the disk drive. Only if you took this extreme last step is the image gone forever. Even if it is gone forever, it may exist in a system backup.
So, what did you do after you hit "X" in the develop module?
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
I've had something of the same question -- particularly after accidentally deleting a photo during early triage that I immediately regretted. Undo would be nice. The Adobe reference says this: "
    • You can view the Deleted album which displays the total number of deleted photos from Lightroom desktop, mobile, and the web. Open Deleted to view your deleted photos.
Is there really a deleted photo album somewhere? I'm using Classic.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
LeeMiller said:
The Adobe reference says this:
  1. You can view the Deleted album which displays the total number of deleted photos from Lightroom desktop, mobile, and the web. Open Deleted to view your deleted photos.
Is there really a deleted photo album somewhere? I'm using Classic.
Click to expand...
The key language in there is where they say “Lightroom desktop, mobile, and the web.” That specific combination always means cloud-based Lightroom, not Lightroom Classic.

In Lightroom Classic, the closest thing to a “Deleted” collection is filtering images so that only images flagged as “Reject” are displayed.
But once a reject (or any image) is formally deleted, it simply doesn't exist in Lightroom Classic any more: Its database record is removed from the catalog, along with its edit history and any metadata/collection/virtual copy info that was ever associated with it. And the actual photo file is moved to the Recycle Bin/Trash.

If the file is pulled out of the Recycle Bin/Trash and imported into Lightroom Classic, that isn’t an undo delete either. Because the image's database record was removed during the deletion, it’s as if it was never imported before. Any edits, organization, and metadata applied before would have to be completely re-done.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Because Lightroom Classic works with a database that can simply be replaced by a backup copy, the way to ‘undelete’ things is to do just that.
 
Upvote 0 Downvote
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top