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Hi
I have had to reinstall Lightroom Classic after my "C" drive went down but catalogue was safe on the "D" drive. Now that the everything is installed and the library reinstated I notice edited photos are back to the originals? How do I retrieve the edited changes, I don't want to start all over again.
Thanks for any help. Mark
You can just double click on it to open it.
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Since you have obviously imported the photos, you need to undo this. Remove the imported photos from the catalog file but not from the hard disk. Importing is completely 100% the wrong thing to do.
Each of your photos should have exclamation point icons on them, and your folders will have ? icons on them. To point Lightroom to the D drive, please follow these instructions (especially Figure 4 and associated text). Adobe Lightroom - Find moved or missing files and folders
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Hi dj_paige,
Thanks for your quick response.
I did not import the catalogue. Once I reinstalled Lightroom Classic and the first time I opened the program the library was there? There are no question marks or exclamation marks on the images or folders?
Mark
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Hi dj_paige,
Further to my last reply I have had another look at my library and the images when selected do say imported 13.01.18 so obviously the program did it automatically. So how do I "undo" this??
Thanks, Mark
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So are there photos in the catalog anywhere with exclamation point icons, or folders on Any drive with question mark icons?
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Nothing at all
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When you said that the catalog was safe on your D drive, excatly what did you do with it? Please tell me step-by-step how you made use of this catalog that was on the D drive.
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Thanks for your patience,
My "users" folder is/was located on my "D" drive. When I got my desktop back after the SSD "C" drive was replaced and a new Windows 10 OS installed they had relocated my original user folder (including the "Pictures" folder with all my images) under a temp folder.
So all I did was relocate all the subfolders back to my mark subfolder under users. I thought that then installed programs would find the files where typically stored which lightroom did. I also thought Lightroom would do automatic backups of edits and stored it on the desktop and opened with lightroom? Althought I must admit I am not familiar with the mechanics of hoe Lightroom stores the history of individual image edits.
Hope this helps
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I'm afraid this doesn't really answer my question. You found the catalog on your D drive. Is this the LR catalog file (name ends with .LRCAT) or was this the photos themselves?
What files were in the user folder?
Did you actually open the catalog file using Lightroom, or did you import the photos (which seems like what ou did)? I need a clear answer here.
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The photos themselves, not the .LRCAT file
I didn't open a catalog using Lightroom, I opened the program for the first time after reinstalling and the catalogue was there, I didn't manually import a catalogue
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I am sorry to say that all the evidence you have provided so far indicates that you or "they" imported your photos, which is the wrong thing to do, and causes the symptoms you are now seeing, no edits.
You need to do a search, using your operating system's search feature, of ALL hard drives and external drives and SSD drives, for files that have a name ending with .LRCAT, or name ending with LRCAT.ZIP. If you find any dated from before the old C drive crashed, then (unzip it if necessary) double-click on it to open it in Lightroom. If you find none, then I believe your edits are gone.
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I located a lightroom catalog-3.lrcat file dated mid Dec 2018. So do I just go back to Lightroom and tap open catelog and browse to this file and open?
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You can just double click on it to open it.
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Who are "they" you refer to? What did "they" do with your LIghtroom catalog. It seems like "they" imported your photos, is this what happened?
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PS; I do have a Lightroom backup on an external drive but couldn't find a restore button in the program. This may be an easier fix?
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marku65697651 wrote
PS; I do have a Lightroom backup on an external drive but couldn't find a restore button in the program. This may be an easier fix?
Is this referring to your photos which are backed up; or is this referring to a backup of the catalog file, which is probably a .zip file?