Last week, we discussed the options for fixing mistakes using Undo, History and restoring an entire backup catalog.
But what if you only want to restore part of the backup catalog? Perhaps you accidentally synchronized Develop settings across a folder of photos, or you accidentally removed specific photos from your catalog. If you’ve worked on other photos since the backup was created, you probably won’t want to restore the entire backup catalog, as you’d lose the other work you’ve done. Instead, you can restore just the settings for specific photos.
- Find your most recent backup in your Backups folder. The backups are stored in dated subfolders, with the zip file named to match your catalog name, to make them easy to identify. (If you’re using Lightroom 5 or earlier, the catalog won’t be zipped.)
- Double-click on the zip file to decompress it. The *.lrcat file appears next to the zip file.
- Move the backup *.lrcat file to a temporary location, such as the Desktop. (If you’re using Lightroom 5 or earlier, copy rather than move.)
- Double-click on the *.lrcat file to open it into Lightroom.
- Find the photos you’d like to transfer to your normal working catalog. Double check that they’re not marked as missing, and if they are, fix the broken links. (If the backup catalog is quite old, you may have moved some of the files).
- Select the photos and go to File menu > Export as Catalog. Select a temporary location, such as the Desktop, and give the exported catalog a name such as “Transfer.lrcat”. Check Export selected photos only and leave the other checkboxes unchecked.
- Go to File menu > Open Recent and open your normal working catalog.
- Go to File menu > Import from Another Catalog and navigate to the Transfer.lrcat catalog file you created in step 6.
- At the top of the Import from Catalog dialog, check the All Folders checkbox.
- The availability of the other options in the dialog depends on your reason for restoring the data from the backup catalog. (For a deep dive into the Import from Catalog dialog, see the Multi-Computer chapter starting on page 481 in my Lightroom CC/6 book.)
These are the most likely options:- If you’re restoring photos you accidentally removed from the catalog, select Add new photos to catalog without moving in the New Photos section.
- If you’re restoring metadata for photos that still exist in the catalog, select Metadata and develop settings only from the Replace pop-up in the Changed Existing Photos section. (To keep the current settings as a virtual copy, check the checkbox below too.)
- Press Import to transfer the metadata into your working catalog.
- Once you’ve confirmed that the settings have transferred, delete the backup and exported catalog from the Desktop.
Before we finish this topic, we should just mention one limitation. When importing from other catalogs, Lightroom imports all of the data about your chosen photo. For example, you can’t import just the Develop settings for a photo without also importing its keywords. There is, however, a workaround. If you check the Preserve old settings as a virtual copy checkbox, your current settings are retained as a virtual copy. You can then use John Beardsworth’s Syncomatic plug-in to sync specific metadata (e.g. keywords) from the virtual copies to the updated masters.
Great article!
Excellent article, got me out of a jam. Easy to follow and accurate at every step.
Thanks
Glad to hear it Peter!
Hi. I bought a new computer and can’t find some of my files. I’m trying to recover pictures I took of my daughters first birthday I think I found the backup catalog for it will I be able to restore this way even if I can’t find the original files?
Hi
The catalog doesn’t contain actual photos, only a link to them. If Lightroom has previews built, then it can see a small low res copy of the file, but this is still not the file. This blog explains:
https://www.lightroomqueen.com/lightroom-catalogs-top-10-misunderstandings/
You need to look for the actual photo files.
The only file I have in my backup folder “H:\Lightroom\Backups\2016-06-17 2351” is a file called “Lightroom 5 Catalog” with no .lrcat file. So no matter what “Lightroom 5 Catalog” file I copy and open it gives me the same looking catalog. I’m I missing something here?
Wow what a huge help. Thank you! Saved an hour or two or re-editing.
Thanks – very helpful.
I am afraid this didn’t work for me.
I inadvertantly deleted a folder that originally had around 900 photos recently taken at Yosemite. (I still had a backup copy of the original folder.) I think I deleted the photos in the folder from within Lightroom (and emptied the trash too!) without realizing I was getting rid of everything and that this was the source of another problem i was having. Then I quit and restarted Lightroom. Pix gone. 🙁
Okay; then I copied all the missing photos from the backup into the very same folder where I did the editing and from which I had deleted, and then I imported everything in that folder into Lightroom again. No edits. 🙁
I tried the process you describe above, which should have restored at least some edits because my backup catalog was definitely from after about half of the edits. I followed the steps above to no avail. No edits appear.
I’m on a Mac using Classic 10.3. Any further thoughts or must I start all over from scratch? Sigh. Thank you.
Open (a copy of…) the backup catalog and see if it contains the edits you’re looking for. If it does, we can go from there.
No, when I open Lightroom from the backup catalog my changes are not there.
(Sorry for the delay in responding. I didn’t realize you were right there! Much appreciated.
I’m Mitchell Z, by the way. I changed my user ID earlier but it doesn’t seem to have gone through when I signed in here.
Do I correctly infer from the time stamp that you are in the UK?
You’re quite right, the sunny Isle of Wight on the south coast. If you open the backup catalog and the edits aren’t there, then there’s nothing to restore. You could check other backup catalogs though.
Very mysterious. I can’t figure out why I don’t have at least some of the edits that I did. Well — grrr — back to square one and I have to be careful with marking all next time.
This is what I think happened: I was having another problem — when I used the merge function, the merged photo did not appear next to those it was created from, but at the very end of the 900 photos. To try to deal with that, I marked all photos in the folder, then sorted them by capture date. I think I failed to unmark the group, and so when i thought I was a little while later deleting (from Lightroom and from the disk) just one photo, I deleted everything. That’s what I think happened though I’m not absolutely sure.
How do you, by the way, make the merged photo stay with the group it’s merged from. Sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t and it wasn’t clear to me that I was doing anything different. Thanks.
For future reference, you don’t need to select the photos before changing the sort order. But yeah, that could certainly explain it. Does your most recent backup not have those edits?
Custom sort order would explain the edited one getting separated, sort by capture time will avoid it.
On to further catastrophe. I am thinking maybe I need to give up on all this and see if I can find a Browne somewhere or take up bowling.
I gave up this morning and started all over with the set of photos. After three hours of revisions, I decided that was it for the day, and quit Lightroom so it would save and backup my changes. I get a message saying something was wrong and it couldn’t save or back up (can’t recall which), and that something would fix the problem on next startup. Next startup, it asked about which catalog I wanted to use because there was a problem with the default. Whatever I opened (of today’s date I think) displayed photos from my iMac but nothing from my G-Drive with most of my photos.
The catalog I found from a day ago includes the G-Drive but none of today’s changes. I am at a complete loss.
I’m going out for a while. I might bury my camera and computer in the garden.
Oh yuk, that’s frustrating. That sounds like a hardware error, possibly the drive failing? Might be best to move this conversation to the forum (link on the menubar) where it’s easier to chat and share screenshots.
Yes, I’ll move to there to see what others think. But the G-Drive hasn’t failed. It’s live and well on my desktop, and the photos in the folder that has this problem are all there and viewable in the FastRaw Viewer.
Could be a permissions problem of some description, but hardware would still be much first suspicion, so I’d make sure your backups are up to date.